Ouch! That gave me a headache. I think I'll stay away from stage lights.
Chuck Norcutt
Ken Norton wrote:
>> Ken, you are really bad, if our Disneyland had not changed the lighting
>> setup I have to buy another E-thing now and throw away the 5D II. The two
>> shots were made at different date, both straightly output from RAW:
>>
>
>
> Well, I know which of the two pictures I prefer. The blue haze noise in the
> E-thingy shot is easily cleaned up with chroma noise reduction and a touch
> of curves adjustment on the shadows.
>
> What I recognize is the use of LED lighting. Photographing productions lit
> with LED lighting is becoming a gut-wrenching nightmare. The color shifting
> is so severe that we have literally no way to color match any more. If you
> get the skintones matching, the wash color is totally different. If you
> match the wash color, the skintones turn cadaverish.
>
> Unfortunately, nearly all of the stage stuff I've photographed this year has
> been heavily LED lit for the colors, but the spots and moving lights all use
> gels or dichroics. It is really impossible to get stuff matching anymore.
> This is especially a problem if the lighting uses a mixture of LED and
> gelled hot lamps to create a color wash over the entire scene. To the human
> eye, everything matches, but to the camera, it does anything but match.
> However, I have found that Fuji Superia 400 and 800 films hold the colors
> much closer to how the eye sees the scene.
>
> Almost without exception, I get far better results shooting film than
> digital in stage productions. Your pictures show one common problem with
> digital. To hold some color and brightness in the background, anything lit
> by follow spots gets burned out. With film, I can lean into the shoulder of
> the film and still get great skintones and highlights without burning out
> while still getting background lighting. (Fujicolor print films don't color
> shift when overexposed). If you use highlight recovery the skintones, which
> are supposed to be skintonish turn grey or cyan.
>
> I also shoot the occasional concert and when you have stage access you get
> the lights directly in the framing. With digital you get that nasty halo and
> color shift in the lights and they turn into burned out blobs of bilge. With
> film, the lights usually maintain their colors (red lights stay red, not
> turn to white with yellow halos surrounded by a field of reddish pink). It
> gets really ugly when the stage is fogged--you never know what color the fog
> is going to turn into.
>
> The contrast under stage lighting is so extreme, but film's shoulder and toe
> really give you much more usable color and image. I'd have no qualms
> shooting CH's Disney production with Fuji Superia 800 and if you underexpose
> by one stop (effectively giving you ISO 1600), you still end up with a
> decent image as long as you don't try to boost the shadows too much.
>
> Most digital (and some films) really choke on Rosco #382 Congo Blue. To the
> human eye, the scene is a deep purple, but to the camera it gets assigned a
> straight blue. As mentioned in another thread it's because of the blue-red
> portions. In the case of Congo Blue there is a double-peak in the
> transmitted wavelengths. First wavelength is centers on about 450nm (blue)
> and the second one is essentially an IR pass filter with the visible
> spectrum cut occuring at 700nm and is completely nulled by almost 680nm. The
> problem here is that the digital camera's IR cut filter is kicking it about
> the same point and they essentially null each other out and the camera ends
> up not seeing the red light. This is one area where neally all Kodak
> sensored cameras have a slight advantage because the IR cut filter occurs at
> a longer wavelength than most. Downside is the occasional magenta black
> (which the E-1 is so blessed with too, it's not just the Leica M8).
>
> Oh, and that deep midnight blue or indigo of gelled stage lights? To match
> that for the human eye with LED lighting, you use a combination of blue and
> red LEDs with the red LED's very much in the visible spectrum. Of course,
> things can get really ugly if any lights use dichroic filters--which are
> common in intelligent lights.
>
> There are deep indigo gels that produce a true purple instead of the
> blue-red dual-wavelengths. These gels have the distinct advantage of going
> near-UV and will actually cause some florescing to occur, just like UV
> lights. Most digital cameras will turn this to a straight blue with no green
> or red detectors triggered. The sensor in the E-1, however, has the red
> detectors sensitive to the very short purple wavelengths, so an E-1 will
> actually capture a true purple as purple, albiet with a massive decrease in
> sensitivity. It captures the purple, but about 2-3 stops low.
>
> AG
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