So I've done some more gig shooting in appaling light. I didn't actually mean to have my camera with me - couldn't get any answer from the organisers indicating that I wouldn't be hassled, and in this case I was far more interested in seeing this singer perform. Nevertheless, I was a bit far, the 50mm was no good, so I had the 24-105L at 105mm all the time, and the lighting was absolutely atrocious. There were heavy lights on the stage at the left and right ends, both rotating between heavy reds, magentas and blues. There were more lights on either side just in front of the stage. These were mostly tungsten, not very strong at all, but also rotated with the aforementioned heavy coloured lights. No light directly in front.
The net result was the girl's face was lit from either side, and shadowed down the middle, and if she moved out from directly behind the microphone, she would have this big microphone shaped shadow across her face. Which looks a lot worse on the pictures than it does in real life. The coloured lights easily flooded the tungsten completely.
Consider this shot:
Click the image for the full size version. Aside from cropping it down to the relevant section, it is unmodified. See the way the magenta looks blown out? But the histogram doesn't show this:
Also, some spots don't seem to have any colour on, like the bit on her hair. So it seems that the camera reaches a threshold, where there's too much of one colour and it overloads, so to speak.
How do you guys handle this? I can't seem to figure out a way to deal with this in post. Playing with the colour levels just makes matters worse. Would coloured filters (like, the real glass ones) help?
I don't want to take the colour out completely - it's part of the amosphere. But it would be good if it doesn't look like I took to it with purple paint.
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