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Re: [OM] IMG: What is reality, man?

Subject: Re: [OM] IMG: What is reality, man?
From: DZDub <jdubikins@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:01:55 -0600
It's an interesting series.  Because the live person looks fine in the
first one, I don't care so much how the video looks. Of course, I wasn't
there.  I thought the BW version was quite nice.  What PWP does well, it
does quite well.

Joel W.




On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 12:53 AM, Peter Klein <pklein@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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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>
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