Fluro lights are the bane of my existance

Well I was asked to take pics at a black belt grading at Kallangur a couple of weeks back.

This was a great opportunity to take some awesome high speed shotsso I said yes.

Turns out the environment was a bit like......

Big dimly lit hall with multiple different coloured fluro lights....

So for a black belt grading, where you have heaps of very, very quick movements, you need a faster shutter speed (I tried for 1/500th but it wasn't happening, as black belts tend to cause blurring at 1/250th, so most were at 1/320th or 1/400) and for a dimly lit room I needed a quick, bright lens.

So out comes the nifty fifty yet again to the rescue! Even at f1.8/ f2.0 I was at the mercy of the limited light, so with a healthy boost of ISO at 2000/2500 I was able to keep up with most of the action.

I had already adjusted for the fluros with my white balance.... but at a slower shutter speed.  

My next problem soon came after I started pulling the shutter speed down....

As you could see, I noticed that I started to pick up portions of the cycling light, giving me RED, BLUE, GREEN, RED, BLUE, GREEN etc. Unfortunately I don't have enough access to many, many decent lights to flood the room; Or even strobes that could recycle at ridiculous speeds, so I thought that I could alter the white balance once I get into lightroom, as thankfully both the red and blue tinted pics were uniform in their brightness. The green ones didn't (as you can see above).

Also unfortunately quite a few of the green tinted piccies  that I had taken had the best poses oddly enough.

So I set about trying to fix these "little green monsters" by using an in program grad filter.

Lower half pigment - Argh!

Then with a stroke of genius (or luck, whichever you think) I thought of placing a light purple grad filter over the green side (cause Green + Red + Blue = White right?) and it helped to make them look a bit more normalllller....

Just added the grad filter - needs more work though

Then with a bit of a fiddle with the colour intensity, and a bit of exposure, I managed to save a couple of shots that would've otherwise looked a bit mixed processed if you know what i mean :S..

And here is a few more shots from the day that still need slight adjustments. I'd also thought that a few of these would look cool with a complete colour strip for effect.

Congrats to young max and hope you like the pics.

Cheers,

Az.