When photographing indoor events, most of the time you will be working alongside other photographers. Indoor venues provide a static environment where one can really control the lighting especially through the use of strobes. If you are shooting with available light, sans strobes, it is a given that some of your photos will get blown out due to another photographer using strobes. This is a fact of life.
The simple explanation is the sudden blast of light is much brighter than what your camera settings are configured. In the case at the Wells Fargo Center, the strobes the NHL Images photographer uses are 5 stops brighter than available light. That is 32 times the amount of light when compared to available light. Obviously, any photo taken at the same time, even just for a fraction of the strobes firing duration, will be over exposed.
This was the case on Saturday, Oct 14th. I was shooting from the Zamboni tunnel hole for the first period when Captain Claude Giroux, who was moved to a winger position this season by the Flyers' coach, squared off against Washington Capitals' captain Alex Ovechkin. These are the face-off pictures I like. You have two superstars directly competing against each other in the same frame. The players lined and I snapped a few pictures of Ovechkin since he was facing me. The referee dropped the puck which Claude won. The puck was thrown back in my general direction which both players responded by immediately chasing. I took a photo of the players and continued to shoot for the rest of the period. It was between periods when I saw that I caught a strobe when both players turned to chase the puck. Yup. I was the proud owner of one blown out photo.
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| Original overexposed photo |
As my luck would have it, I really liked this photo. Both players faces were visible and I liked its composition. Luckily, it wasn't too far gone. So when the colors are too far gone but you still have some detail left in the photo, you do what most photographers would do. You turn it into a black and white photo. Black and white photos look artsy, but more importantly, it strips the blown out colors and converts them to shades of gray. Now a horrible photo gets a new lease on life.
I applied Lightroom's B&W 2 preset to the photo. I then proceeded to adjust the black clipping, clarity, contrast, and exposure. I then used a gradient filter to adjust the exposure for the blown out part of the photo. After some more tweaking with the settings, along with adding some grain and a vignette, I came up with a usable black and white photo.
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| "Captains" - Captain Claude Giroux wins a face-off against Captain Alex Ovechkin |
I then had the idea to make the photo a black and orange photo. I normally would use Photoshop's color overlay Fx to achieve this look. I then found that the same effect can be done with Lightroom using the Split Toning panel in the Develop Module. The three main options you have are Highlights, Balance, and Shadows. Under the Highlights and Shadows sections are Hue and Saturation sliders and a color picker box to the right of their titles. Both the sliders and the color picker box do the same thing. Since I wanted an orange color, I set the Hue to 35 and the Saturation at 100 for both sections. I realized I would have to make a red version as well. For that one, I only had to change the Hue to 20 to achieve it. And that is how I saved a blown out photo from someone else's strobes.
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| "Captains" - Flyers Edition |
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| "Captains" - Capitals Edition |
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