This was at a bluegrass festival. Lighting was natrual and terrible in balance. Sun lit the stage base and faces were is shadow.  Metering for bright areas leaves dark faces while metering for faces leaves blowouts.

The only shots that seemed to work were zoomed in on individuals and lighting was more consistent.  I found no way to get an entire band lit properly for a pic.  

My only afterfhought was an "upside down" gradient density filter..still I wonder what could be done in exposure if anything to help.   Got any suggestions?

Images are from camera with slight sharpening only(I use no in-camera sharpening).  Help!

Thanks for any thoughts.   TomDart.

This is zoomed into one band member only.       TomDart.

No adjustments have been made but slight sharpening to posted images.

If this will help, exif for the band shot is 1/320 sec at f/6.3.  The second shot is same but speed of 1/200 sec.

Perhaps to dodge the pics digital correction might help but I don't use that much.    Tom.

Hope this helps. I used an adjustment layer to correct levels, saturation, contrast. THen masked the spots that got blow out. I'll explain more L8R gotta run. All the best. :o)

in photoshop i messed around with levels....adjusted contrast....did a bit of dodging....adjusted saturation .....  most of these can be done in a darkroom as well but not as easy ot fast (in my experience anyway)....... probably the ideal way to take such an image is to take a RAW image with a digital camera....you don't lose as much color and density information with a RAW image

Well depends on how difficult the light is Raw helps a lot esp with white balance  I tend to bracket exposures by 1/2 to  1 stop or make some exposure adjustment and fix it if need be in photoshop 

Ideally, you should take an incident reading from on stage, that is not always possible especially if the stage in inaccessible, the next best option would be to spot meter if you have a spot meter (expensive) or your cameras meter has one, failing these two options you can use a partial meter. (not as accurate) A work around is to use a partial meter with a long lens for the meter reading, this will effectively reduce the percentage of coverage in a wider scene, so when you zoom out/mount a wider lens, you will get an effect closer to a spot meter.

 

Confusing maybe, but think of a wide landscape with a 9% partial centre, then the same landscape with a 300mm lens with a 9% partial centre, now fit a 24mm lens and think about the size that the 9%  was with a 300m lens, you now have something like 3% centre, don’t take my word for it go out and try it!

You have to use the settings that the reading with the long lens was for the shot (yeh a lot of messing about but cheaper than £3-400 for a spot mertr)

 

In a situation like this amount of light from highlight to shadow is quite different, I would think about 1 ½-2 stops looking at it, so you are faced with the possibility of getting either burnt or close to burnt highlights or deep shadow (especially with digital) for a commercial job the emphasis would most likely be on the band and therefore a compromise of slight over exposure in the foreground may be necessary. For personal or competition work you may feel that this is an unacceptable compromise.

 

I would probably use film as it has a much wider (and forgiving) exposure latitude.

 

A general rule is to use an incident meter where possible, as this is generally more accurate than a reflective meter (what TTL metering is) not always practical or possible (perfect world scenario)

 

Whilst on a stage subject scenario, if you are photographing, say a gig where there is a lot of blue light, you will need to over expose, as blue light has a lower luminosity than red or green, the human eye reacts in the same way, but the brain is able to compensate for it better.

 

Remember that the mid tone is 18% gray! (or is it really?) Some speculation about that too. Another story!

 

 

Enola, thanks for the very informative post.       TomDart.

When the time comes again, I hope for better lighthing in the first place.  Unfortuantely, later bands had better light due to Sun position.  This one did not.

BTW, I know they are not thinking of photographers...but those who did the stage would have done better to paint that door behind the banjo player  in  woodtones like  the rest. 

Yeh the door dose look a little odd, people don’t pay much thought to the poor photographers, fact of life I'm afraid.

 

Picking the best light is all part of the job, sometimes its just right, but often in situations like this the sun is in the wrong place (too high/too low or even non existent etc)

 

Sometimes you just have what you have, so have to decide to take it or leave it, from a personal point of view I would take it if it was about capturing a moment.

Professionally it may be more of a business decision, but you would be surprised what people may or may not like, just because you think that an image isn’t very good, doesn’t mean its poor it just means you don’t personally like it, someone will think its fantastic!

 

I know what you mean about how folks like photos.   I took a series of shots at an old poineer fort with a reenactment going on...the participants thought the pics were some of the best they had seen of the action!  For me, sure, some images were pretty good and others only so so.  Then again, the viewers were not judging by my viewpoint.   

I have a Sekonic meter and use it for incident light when possible. Otherwise, I use the "spot" on my Nikon to meter areas.  This is a smaller spot reading than the "partial" in Canon and seems to offer a pretty good reflected reading.  I have yet to fork up the bucks for a spot rangefinder for the Sekonic.              TomDart.

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Hi Tom,

I have that for you

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I have to confess I know little about the Nikon cameras, but expect that their metering is pretty accurate, a hand held spot meter probably isn’t exceptionally more accurate and they can be expensive, maybe not worth a great outlay unless you are really going to get a lot of use from it, at the end of the day all it does is set the aperture and shutter speed.

If all else fails there is always the sunny sixteen calculation lol

 

The Canon spot is 2.4% and multi spot on their pro DSLR's and 9% partial on the 20D and the like, with a 3.5% on the 30D and 5D, I suspect that the larger spot is one way they keep their prices competitive.

 

Kind of off topic a bit now, so better just bid you good luck with your photography ventures.

 

Just FYI: The spot meter on de D70(s) is 1%

For difficult lighting situations like this;

1. Shoot in RAW...much more flexibility

2)Radlafx is bang on with his method..use adjustment layers for curves to bring out the shadow areas, then mask the areas that are blown out.  I usually flatten the layers then and adjust saturation on the flattened image.

This beats shelling out $$$$ for extra metering...and unfortunately your digital cam will never have that range anyway.

Also Tom, "hoping for better lighting".....it rarely happens.....