Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2014/02/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]This is long, but you may find it interesting. I just spent several hours over a couple of days trying to get a picture "right." There were several different degrees of "right" and "not right," with no clear-cut answer. You might come to a different conclusion than I did. Come into the kitchen with me and let's see what was cooking. And see the following four pictures after my last example for the conclusion of the series. On Monday evening I shot a wild and crazy contemporary music festival. I'm friends with several of the musicians. The festival included several pieces where the musicians performed with computer-generated imagery projected on a big screen, as well as computer-generated sound. There was changing stage lighting, and spotlights on soloists that were drastically brighter than the ensemble lighting. Fun stuff. :-) I was sitting in an ordinary seat in row 3, and did not have stage access. As someone who plays music myself, and has shot plays and concerts for 44 years, I pride myself on knowing how to do things without being heard, disrupting or distracting. So no changing lenses during the performance, no chimping, and no excess fiddling with the camera. I set most parameters before each piece, and adjusted exposure by counting detents on my Olympus E-M5's exposure compensation dial. I ended up using my Pansonic/Leica 25mm f/1.4 for the whole concert. One shot posed a particular challenge. In the piece "Up Close" by Michael van der Aa, a cello soloist doesn't just play with a string chamber orchestra and electronic sound. She also interacts with a projected video that runs during the piece. This created a perfect storm of mixed color temperatures. Here's the first white balance, done for the tungsten stage lights. The live woman is fine, the video is blue, blue blue. <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/album170/P2170091+_2_.jpg.html> Balance it for the video, and the live performer becomes the Lady in Excess Red. <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/album170/P2170091+_1_+.jpg.html> So what to do? I tried black and white. Which was OK, but not quite what I wanted. Not enough difference between live and Memorex. <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/album170/P2170091bw+.jpg.html> I spent a couple of hours making masks (not my best skill, and I use Picture Window Pro, not Photoshop, so I don't have a magic lasso). Eventually I did a combination of a polygon for the screen, merged with a mask keyed to most shades of blue, plus another to reddish hues, cloned one into the other, blended the two white balances through this mask, then and manually adjusted the final result with the clone tool. It ended up mostly, reasonably technically correct, but the blue spill in the foreground is impossible, and it's not what I perceived when I saw it. During the performance, I didn't see the drastic color difference that the camera "saw." But there was a difference, and this rendering almost eliminates it. <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/album170/P2170091-composite2ClonShpFinalCrop.jpg.html> At which point I decided that realism was futile. OK, let's get interpretive. I tried a partially desaturated version of the original tungsten balance. <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/album170/P2170091Desat.jpg.html> But the picture I eventually chose to post was the one below. I used the tungsten white balance, so the live performer appeared normal, and a bit of selective color correction towards grey to reduce but not eliminate the blueness in the video performer only. This added some mixed-toned B&W surrealness to the video image. It was not exactly what I saw, but it evoked the same sensation as what I saw. Besides, my wife preferred this one. :-) <http://www.flickr.com/photos/24844563 at N04/12664153803/> Again, see the following four pics for the conclusion of the series. Thanks for bearing with me. --Peter