Question by baldmosher: 35mm film SLR camera, what settings for fluorescent light?
It’s a Minolta 5000 SLR camera, standard 35-70mm lens, ISO200 35mm film. I’m trying to work out what settings to use for a fairly bright fluorescent kitchen light.
I assume that fluorescent light flickers at 50Hz, which I assume also means that the light is 25 times on and 25 off per second. So if I set the shutter to 1/25″ I’d have a 100% chance of having the light on only once whilst the shutter is open. Ideal. But the shutter settings on this camera only do 1/15″ or 1/30″.
Simple maths tells me that 1/15 would have a chance of being on once, or twice. 1/30 would have a chance of being on once, or not at all.
Am I talking rubbish here?
And if I’m not talking rubbish, what shutter & aperture setting should I be using?
Best answer:
Answer by fhotoace
There are no settings for white balance on a 35 mm camera … or any other camera that uses film.
What you need is a lens filter. FLD when you are using daylight film under fluorescent lighting or an FLB if you are shooting with tungsten film under fluorescent lamps
The only time you have to be concerned about the frequency of lamps is when you are shooting video and there are computer or television screens in the shot. But that is not what you are talking about. Electromagnetic ballasts may cause problems for video recording as there can be a ‘beat effect’ between the periodic reading of a camera’s sensor and the fluctuations in intensity of the fluorescent lamp. Still photos rarely show this.
What do you think? Answer below!
Forget about it.
Don’t include the lamp in the photo. I believe flicker only appears when the lamp is in the frame.
You may also want to use some color correction filters, as fhotoace recommends. Film under fluorescent gives an ugly green cast.
If your mains frequency is 50 Hz, a fluorescent lamp will blink at 100Hz frequency (full light output at the positive and negative peaks of the voltage waveform). Due to the decay of the phosphor in a fluorescent lamp, it will not blink off fully. A shutter speed of 1/100, 1/50, … will guarantee that exposures will come out the same. Any other shutter speed under 1/100 seconds will give very slight differences in exposure, probably not enough to worry about.
You’ll have problems with a green cast from the fluorescent lamps. May want to get a filter to correct that.
http://www.camerafilters.com/pages/fl.aspx
A screw on filter or a photo gel over your lens is how WB is done with a film camera to counter green you probably should go with a purpleish filter. Test a roll of grey cards in the lighting before you shoot the scene