Commack High School Soccer Under the Stars
Wins for both the boys and girls soccer teams, both against Bay Shore. This gallery has both the boys and girls games as well as the halftime show.
Whenever you shoot under field lights, whether portable or not, you’re going to have color challenges. The portable ones are especially problematic. I thought I’d discuss what you can and can’t do to minimize these problems.
First the problems. The lights are all different colors. This has to do with how old the lamps are but may also be caused by different manufacturers’ lamps. Next, the lamps don’t reproduce the entire color spectrum. Some colors are not well represented, usually blues. Next, the lamps pulse along with the 60Hz current cycle causing the lamps to not only pulse in intensity, but also shift colors. Finally, they’re just not very bright. Once darkness set in I was up at ISO 25,600 to get a 1/500 sec. shutter speed at f/5.6.
So what can you do? For the color issues, white balance will not solve your problem. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to get the white balance as close as possible, but you’re not going to get it perfect with white balance. In fact, you’re not going to get the colors perfect unless you want to individually recreate the missing colors, which is a massive undertaking for this many photos. One new tool in Capture One that worked somewhat well is the new Smart Adjustments tool. This tool allows you to select a photo with good colors then shift the white balance in other photos to match it. Note that it doesn’t just copy the white balance. It actually adjusts the white balance to match a specific skin tone.
As far as the dim lighting goes, all you can do is raise your ISO. Given the choice of noisy photos or photos with a lot of motion blur I’ll pick the noisy photos every time. Even at ISO 25,600, 1/500 sec. is way below what I would consider a good shutter speed for action photos but using a higher ISO would create so much noise the photos would be unacceptable.
So … you do what you can do. They’re not pretty but they’re usuable.
