BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: Problems with Images

Red lights washing out details

This was taken at an outdoor jazz concert in the evening. I was using Fuji 1600 film in my Olympus OM-10, in the hope that I could freeze the musicians' movements instead of getting blurs. I was using my 35-70 zoom from about sixty feet from the stage.

I encountered a real problem every time the light crew turned on the red stage lights. As you can see here, that shade of red obliterated every bit of edge detail and turned the subjects into mush. I never had this problem when the blue lights or other colors were on, but the red lights killed everything.

Is this a general problem with faster film like the 1600? Is there some sort of filter or better f-stop I could use (I think I used f4.5 since it was so dark much of the time) to prevent this? Any other recommendations? I switched to Kodak B&W 800 after this roll was done and those shots came out quite well.

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March 05, 2004

http://www.betterphoto.com/gallery/dynoGallDetail.php?photoID=300726&memberID=63634&memberGall=1

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March 05, 2004