FotoHog wrote:
Any suggestions on how to work with stage lights? The multi colored flood and spot lights present a major challenge to me. How do you deal with that? . . .
Because of a life spent as an engineer, it is necessary for me to approach questions like yours not only seeking to answer "how," but also understanding "why" and "what if my first plan doesn't work."
In my experience, the first step in photographing stage presentations is to understand what the lighting is intended to do. I have a couple of friends who are "dramatic artists," and have had a number of visits with them to help understand how to address this challenge. Here are a few of the nuggets that I have been able to glean from these visits.
**Live stage presentations are very different from presentations intended to be photographed or filmed or otherwise recorded. They are intended to capture the human vision and mind and to allow the audience to develop a "suspension of disbelief." This is a critical part of these presentations, and essentially means that the primary objective (or at least one primary objective) is to make the audience forget that they are watching a staged presentation. The same is true of really good movies and movie venues. In one of the best movie theaters in the Dallas area (no longer in existence) the projection screen was set into an architectural feature that was designed to make the audience feel that they were looking through a window. There was no curtain, no visible speakers or lighting sconces, just that simple frame around the screen.
**Because the stage, scenery, and props are necessarily physically limited, both the set design and lighting design (when done right) are intended to separate the characters, whether they be actors or, in your case, dancers, from the setting. This makes it easier for the audience to expand that background in their minds to better reflect the "real" world. This is not at all unlike the way that photographers use various techniques, including background design, selective focus, and others, to separate their subjects from the backgrounds when making portrait photographs. One of the most common techniques is to use a completely different color 'palette' (not ure this is exactly the right word here) for the background than is used for the featured characters.
**This means that most of the time, your challenge is to determine the lighting used for the featured performers and set your camera manually to match that lighting. In my experience, EL's counsel is right on target. For a number of years, I've been using custom white balance settings, and have found that they almost always fall somewhere between 2800K and 4000K. Older venues that still have older lighting equipment tend to fall toward the lower end of that range, while more modern setups will be farther toward 4000K. I have found that using Auto White Balance is a disastrous mistake almost every time. The pronounced extreme colors of the background set elements mercilessly confuse the in-camera processor, producing results that are far from anything useful. For instance, I have learned that a custom white balance close to 2900K will produce results that are really close to correct for events in my church's sanctuary at night. Many other venues have yielded very good results at 3200K-3400K.
Of course, there are going to be times when your goal is not so much to record the performers as to capture the overall scene or environment. In this case, you obviously do the opposite, which is to set to the overall balance of the stage. But even then, rarely do you want to go all the way to "correct." If a scene has an overall blue appearance, it is generally not desirable to eliminate that blue entirely, but rather to just "tame" it somewhat to allow better visual representation of it. The same is true for red or yellow or any other color. The problem in this case is that in any scene lighted monochromatically, the complementary colors are never going to be fully recoverable, because they simply aren't there to be reflected from objects of those colors. (To demonstrate this effect to yourself, go out at night and photograph a blue car under sodium street lights--the yellow ones. Try to recover the blue color of the car in post processing. Simply can't be done without repainting that car.) Here the effect is usually much more pronounced under LED lighting than under incandescent lighting, because incandescent lamps and filters have a lot more trouble being truly monochromatic than some of the more modern types of lighting. So you just have to remember what we learned earlier about the presentation not being about the sets and just do the best you can.
Finally...be sure to either use a shutter speed slower than or equal to 1/60 second (in North America) or 1/50 second (in Europe). In some cases, color balance shifts somewhat during the voltage swings of the power cycle. You need to capture at least a full cycle to get the correct color balance. If your camera has "Flicker Reduction," you can use shutter speeds of 1/120 or 1/100, respectively, because that function will "synch" your shutter to any light intensity variation that might be present.
This may be way more than you wanted to know about this subject, but I hope it helps at least a little.