photography... high contrast lighting

After

 

Before

Church lighting is difficult sometimes.

In this picture those "running the lights" in the church are focused on what is happening on the stage and not on the young people who have walked to the floor of the sanctuary. So they do not turn up the house lights. The folks nearer me are in the spotlights trained on the stage and those farther away are in the dark.

The human eye makes some adjustment for this so it is not as apparent to the church-goer as it is to the photographer, but still they should have had more light.

I took several exposures of this scene from my chair on the front row. In all but this exposure one of the boys is back "off the line" and this was the only one where you could see his face. None of the others were lit any better. So this was the best composition to work with.

As you can tell I cropped it so that pulled everyone tighter into the frame. As you might expect I used the sliders in Camera Raw and Lighthouse to expose the shadows and dark areas as best I could. It wasn't good enough. So I made a duplicate layer and then set it to "screen". I then made that layer to one of its own. I then reset the lower layer back to normal. That being the case the folks in the left of frame are now overexposed and those in the right of frame are almost correct.

I erased those on the left at some percentage (I forget now what the setting was). I usually start low and just erase until things start to blend in.

And I did some dodge and burn.

As always I shoot RAW and so pulling things out of darkness is often possible, but if you overexpose you cannot recover those "blown out" areas. So shooting dark is the best option when you have high contrast lighting. IMHO.

If you didn't follow any of that that is okay. If you followed some or all of it then you probably have your own way of doing this sort of thing and if you want to tell me about it "I'm all ears".

So as I said in the last post... this takes time. The more adjustments the longer the time.

The shoot at the church took an hour. It took me three more to come up with about 75 photos. This one was the most difficult.

Let me know what you think...