Flourescents

[utibay]

Hey everyone,

 

I've got a question. I'm shooting in an office on tungsten film. There is a window, and all of the practical lights are flourescents. What do I do?

 

Immediately I'm thinking of putting on a Greet cutting filter on the lense, then putting on CTG's on all the lights... but what about the window? Do I need to gel that up too? Because this is an on locaiton shoot, that might now be an option. But hypothetically speaking, is that what I should do?

 

John

[David Mullen ASC]

You do whatever is easiest to match all the lights (assuming you want them all to match.) If there are a lot of big daylight windows in the shot and it's impossible to gel them, then you should match everything else to daylight -- i.e. swap the tubes to Kino 55's, or if not, Chroma 50's or something like that. Gel the tungsten to daylight.

 

If the flourescents are the dominant light source and the windows are small, then gel the windows to match the fluorescents.

 

You can also consider turning off some of the sources so you don't have three distinct color temperatures to deal with.

[Michael Nash]

You can also try to drown out or overpower the green influence of the fluorescents by adding more daylight with HMI's. If there are pockets of deep background you can turn off those practicals and bounce a daylight balanced light into the ceiling instead. Or simply cover the offending practical light with minusgreen gel, usually 1/8 or 1/4. As long as you don't see the fixture itself in frame, it's a quick fix.

 

But you might also consider shooting with a filmstock that's less sensitive to mixed color temps. Daylight balanced stocks like Kodak or Fuji 250D will minimize (but not eliminate) the color difference. Fuji 500D has a fourth color layer that's supposed to minimize fluorescent green even more. I've only seen the demo and never tried it myself, but it seems to work reasonably well for this.

[Nate Downes]

A trick I've done with flourescents is to use a filter on the lights themselves. Using the right gel and you cut down on the green.

[Eric Steelberg ASC]

I did an office comedy last year and ran into the same problem. We ended up, for budget reasons, using the tungsten tubes already in the hallways and offices while letting the windows stay uncorrected. It made for a nice cool backlight in some cases. I would have preferred to go daylight with everything then correct it in camera, but we didn't have time nor then manpower needed to change all the lights throughout the floor of the building.