EOS R7: What is this dark area in my football photos?

[BK5524]

I'm using a R7 with an EF 70-200mm F2.8 and a Canon adapter. I am still learning and it's a bit overwhelming. The only thing that is new in this group of photos is using the autofocus to follow eyes. I apologize if there's an actual name for this setting. I don't know what else to call it. I have the shutter set for high speed, not because it's a sports photo (I don't generally shoot action), but because the people I do shoot are always moving about and I get better photo choices when there are multiple consecutive shots. I shot these at night on the football field. These are not the only ones that have this weird shading. Does this have something to do with my settings, or is this some strange phenomenon? There may nit be enough info here to answer, but I thought it worth asking.

[BK5524]

It certainly doesn't look here, like it does on my screen where I can easily cycle from one to the next. To give a better description, it's the kind of rusty toned area in each photo. If the photos are actually in order, it starts at the top, then middle, then bottom from pic to pic.

[wq9nsc]

That appears to be light flicker, sodium and mercury vapor stadium lights change color temperature rapidly as they follow the 60 hz line frequency (50 hz in parts of the world).  You can try anti-flicker on your camera to force it to sync to shooting at the peak of the light intensity.  If you are shooting in RAW, setting white balance to white priority will help in post.

Rodger

[BK5524]

Thank you for the reply! I NEVER would have considered this BUT it makes perfect sense. This game was away at an older school and yes, they had older style lighting. I usually take these photos at our school which is brand new, and all the lighting is state of the art LED. I will take note of this and try your suggestion at the next opportunity. 

[wq9nsc · Accepted solution]

You are welcome Brian!  Several years ago I shot photos at a high school field that had a mixture of mercury vapor and high pressure sodium lighting that was a nightmare since those have very different color temperatures and it wasn't uncommon for a player to be illuminated by two very different light sources.

I use a recipe for the initial setup for editing RAW files from football and one part of the recipe is to set the white balance to white priority.  It does a very good job of cleaning up color shift between frames.  Depending upon shutter speed and its relationship to the flicker frequency, you can get very problematic color banding across the photo as the lighting varies over the time the twin "curtains" are exposing the sensor.

But in general auto white priority takes care of most of your frames.

This field uses old school mercury vapor field lighting.  I don't enable anti-flicker but at 1/1,000 shutter speed I rarely have an issue with inconsistent color temp across the frame and white priority along with occasional exposure adjustment in post takes care of the issue.

With turf, you will also get some very different apparent field tint because of the angle of the lighting and the angle of the camera and these two photos from last Friday show that issue.  I decided this isn't worth trying to correct in post because that is actually the way the artificial turf appears depending upon the angle; natural grass is far less likely to show this issue.

Rodger 

[BK5524]

That is quite interesting. When I started photography back in high school, circa 1987, I did yearbook photos, but my preference was nature. Scenery was my "thing". Now that I'm back at it, it's mostly people. High school band, my son's college band (Go Fightin' Gator Marching Band!), and my other son plays football (mostly sidelines though- he's like third string). I really need to invest some time watching some of these great photographers on youtube to continue to learn. I love this little R7, but I have a great desire to move to a full frame. I should see about renting one to see if it will really make a big difference for me. I have made some adjustments to my settings based on some of the things I have heard/learned, but there is also so much that I do not know. These cameras are truly amazing, and overwhelming at the same time. I think I'm getting better, but sometimes the photos I take are lackluster to me. This lighting thing might have something to do with that. I always leave white balance on auto, and this gives me a new thing to try. I don;t know if it matters, but yes I use the RAW setting, and I do my post-work with Lightroom. It seems to be fairly easy to use. I am a novice, and not paid for any of this, so the simpler, the better.

[BK5524]

I tried this this past weekend at a band competition and it worked great. I’ve been used to using aperture priority so I didn’t try the higher shutter speed. I did some test shots with and without anti-flicker enabled and that worked great. The downside is that the drive mode speed is quite a bit slower compared to regular high speed. It’s a trade-off but the photos look better.