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[OM] IMG: What is reality, man?

Subject: [OM] IMG: What is reality, man?
From: Peter Klein <pklein@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 22:53:18 -0800
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@N04/12664153803/>

Again, see the following four pics for the conclusion of the series. 
Thanks for bearing with me.

--Peter
-- 
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