There is an immediate answer...

...to the weird lighting in the Vashon High School gym issue.

That issue was the apparent fact that at a shutter speed of 250th sec and up it's quite possible to capture the changing light output/light color as the metal halide gym lights cycle on-and-off-and-on at 120 hz or 120 times a second.

Consider the following, as-shot:



ISO 12,800, 400th second at f5.0, Auto White Balance.

Not bad, really, and maybe some snapshot-shooters would be satisfied, but to me it's way, way too cool and bluish.

(I've been researching the detailed EXIF data for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV RAW files, and I have yet to figure out just exactly how Canon encodes the white balance data for a photo shot on "Auto White Balance". It's got to be in there somewhere, but currently I'm thinking it's not expressed in degrees Kelvin but rather in an RGGB quadruplet, which I have yet to find/decypher).

Merely doing the RAW conversion with the White Balance set to Fluorescent (approximately 4000 degrees K) improves the photo quite a bit:



except that now it's too yellow-y and the skin tones are too flat.

So, clicking on "More settings" brings up the "Additional Settings" (!) dialog, where we can fiddle with all sort of stuff.

We've got a Blue B9 ... B3 ... 0 ... A3 ... A9 Amber slider, a Green G9 ... 0 ... M9 Magenta slider, and a "Color Tone" drop-down -- which is actually Reddish skin tone -4 ... 0/as-shot ... +4 Yellowish skin tone range -- to play with.

Remember since we're talking about light, we're talking Additive Color here.

Take a look at the Additive Color wheel and green is opposite magenta (which is the combination of red and blue) while blue is opposite yellow ("amber" here) -- yellow being red and green combined.

Which is why our pairings here are "blue" to "amber" and "green" to "magenta".

Why "skin tone" rather than a "red" to "cyan" pairing? I'd guess that a lot of real-world photography has a greater need of fiddling with skin tone rather than fiddling with colors ranging from red to cyan. Also, "skin tone" is a specific adjustment in the Canon EOS Picture Style system, which is what we're really doing here: making micro-adjustments to Canon RAW files before we convert them to tiffs.

Anyhoo, when I pull over the Blue to B5, and dropped down the Skin Tone to -4 Reddish, I get something that I like better, at least, than any other setting.

The floor particularly has lost a little yellow, the skin tones look a little more alive, the green of the uniforms seems to have a little more pop, and we're good to go.

(Note that despite all the sliders and pull-down dialogs this all ends up being really subjective, and also implies a calibrated monitor, which I have).



Here's the finished product:



So to correct the weird lighting issues from the volleyball match I shot in the Vashon High School gym I ended up fiddling with the Blue-Amber slider particularly, added in a touch of Magenta on a couple, and pulled up or down the Skin Tone a taste on a few.

And they came out OK, at least as OK as I was willing to spend time with them.

The real test will be photographing the next VHS volleyball match this coming Friday.