Because every SuperHero needs an Arch-Nemesis... or dealing with Red LED wash lighting and some fire perfomance techniques....

    Ok, shot an event for Elektrofied last Saurday at the Ruby Room. For some reason, maybe because they are named Ruby Room, they tend to have an even more heavy handed liberal dosage of pure red LED stage lighting than any other venue I have been to thus far- and that is saying a lot because clubs like their red wash lights. For those of you who don't know, pure light of any color plays havok on digital camera sensors, but pure red is the worst. If you aren't a tech geek here is the quick primer. Light is broken down into three primary colors- Red, Green and Blue (RGB). Each receiver site on a camera sensor is set to record one and only one of these three colors. Most people, myself included, would naturally assume that these three colors are evenly represented on the sensor capture array, ie 1/3 of the sites capture Red, 1/3 Green, 1/3 Blue. In practice; however, that is not the case. Green light is the predominate color in the human spectrum- unless you live in the desert or total cityscape, a quick look around you will probably demonstrate this. Because of this fact, a typical camera sensor has twice as many Green receiver sites as it does Red or Blue. So automatically when you switch to pure red or blue you are only getting half the capability of your sensor. For normal (incandescent) stage lights, the light isn't a pure color, so it isn't as bad. But LEDs are pretty darn close to pure. I think pure red is even worse than pure blue because it's the antithetical color to green on the primary spectrum- if you look at the shadows cast by red lights, they will have a green tint. So let's take all the factors that play into shooting under a red wash: You are starting out with at best half the capability of your sensor. You are also probably at close to the max useable ISO of your camera so you are pushing those sensor sites to their max, and since the camera can now only see part of the picture, even with spot metering it thinks the target is around half as bright as it actually is. So you get washed out, overexposed horribly red cast images with blown highlights. To put it simply, red LED stage wash lighting is the DEVIL!
    I was hoping the Excalibur would be able to magically deal with this challenge. While it dealt with it better than the D3200, it seems that even a magic sword cannot defeat the devil on its' own. Ruby Room, we met again, and once again you kicked my photographic ass all around the ring. I was able to salvage a few shots, but I had to throw out way too many beautifully timed and framed shots that were just too blown to be salvageable. To give a clear visual of what I am talking about, compare these two images. This one is a completely off the cuff image shot when one of the performers dragged me into the ladies room to see the awesome wall background and climbed up onto the toilet to post. So, full spectrum light, all three colors for the camera to meter and record. Had to do very little post processing at all on this one, pretty much cropping and a bit of raw noise reduction.

   Piece of cake for Excalibur. Now, contrast with the following shot. This one was one of the red wash shots that I was able to salvage. It took about half an hour of tweaking around playing with various levels and adjustments in Aperture to get it to the point it is here. I was able to save about 1 out of every 8 red wash shots, but from a practical workflow point of view, it's way too labor intensive to do, especially since way too often I would spend all the time on an image and still not be able to save anything useful.

 
   So how to deal with this? Though the magic of google and a lot of reading I have come up with three possible solutions. The first one is the worst option in my opinion, but one I may have to wuss out and take on occasion if I really have to get a shot. Use a flash. kinda defeats the purpose of getting a badass low light picture taking machine, and it wrecks any cool effects of the lights. That can be somewhat mitigated by dialing the power wayyyyy down and just providing enough fill to balance the heavy red wash. I'll play with it sometime and see how it works. Second is a last ditch post processing technique. Found this one in a book I am reading in a discussion on when to use black and white versus color. One of the throwaway asides the author threw out was to try black and white if  you have spent hours trying to get the color to work and just can't, but need want to save the shot. So, if you look at the whole album from this event, you will see several B&W conversions. Third, and the one I will really have to try out next time I face the Ruby Room head to head is recognize the single color cast, and respond by deliberately underexposing significantly from the sensor reading so the image won't get blown out and I can pull it up in post and get it back. I think this is the best option, the fun will come in trying to learn to calculate how much to underexpose and when, then get my reaction times fast enough to do it. Or maybe cheat and shoot autobracket and then just use a stack workflow. Finally, there is a fourth suggestion I found, that I really like, but isn't really viable long term- one photog who is just as bitter about this as I am suggested in jest that you could carry a slingshot or airsoft pistol in your camera bag and just shoot out all the red wash lights! As much as I like that idea, I think I will keep it in reserve until after I try the underexposure and flash plans, I have this thing about wanting to avoid jail time....

    Otherwise, the gig was a good opportunity to experiment with some different settings and techniques for shooting fire. Took the ISO way down to 100, dialed the aperture in, dragged out the shutter and added a little rear curtain sync remote flash. Got some decent results, as you can see from the shots below, or in the full gallery

 
  A few of the images had some ghosting instead of a clean flash capture. My theory is that this is because the Phottix Odin system lets me do remote TTL, so that is how I had the flash set up, and the system was trying to adjust and shoot this like a regular shot. Next time I will try taking the flash to manual and see if that gives better results. Still, pretty happy with how the experiment went overall.

    So, while this wasn't my best night of shooting and I didn't wind up with too many useable images from the event, I was at least able to learn a lot and get a lot of ideas on where to go next. So overall a success. Now on to Lucidity Festival and a weekend straight of shooting- while also being the head aerialist rigger for the festival and doing the first family festival camp out with the Happy Dragon himself . Should be another fun filled, fast paced weekend filled with..... opportunities for learning!
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