No one likes the MIB.

every photographer has experienced rocking up to a venue with green tinted windows in the same space as tungsten bulbs. Usually there’s at least one random light bulb that’s sitting at a nice cool 6300k. Super fun and not at all headache and stress inducing. So what do you do? Well to be honest, it’s a bit of a trade off. You can either consign yourself to a mountain of editing with colour correction, masking, and hue slider gymnastics, which all adds time (and costs you money if you didn’t quote for the extra time); or you can use a flash. The problem with flash photography in these spaces is that often you have to overpower your flash to drown out the weird colours, unless you want your backgrounds to all be yellow or some other funky colour. You need to make the background so dark that you don’t have to worry about the colour so much. This gives you another problem, now you’re essentially a walking strobe machine going around blinding people and just generally ruining their good times and their retinas.

This is why it’s always important to know what space you’re going into and to be prepped for it. In my flash kit I carry a warm gel, a green gel (for fluoros), a cool correction gel, and a clip on diffuser. You can also always do a quick search for the venue  and have a look at some of the photography coming out of the space. If it’s all hard flash photography, then you know it’s dark or full of fun colours, if it’s a nice mix of natural and flash then it’s probably fine! At the end of the day, it’s important to find the balance between getting the best photos of the night and not ruining peoples’ night by doing your best MIB impersonation.

Hard overpowering flash

Natural light