Working hard on my band photography, seeing as how I seem to pick up a reasonably good and consistent seat every couple weeks. This is Chanpan, consisting of Grace Dumdaw and Lance and Matthew Tran.
Thanks for seeing my work!
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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"Tricks" are actually very important in LED lights situations. Dealing with out of gamut colours is critical, it's not about shadows harsh or not.
Photography is all about the lighting. Saying shadows dont matter is an out of touch statement. Could OP have used some tricks, sure. However the lighting designer could have done a lot better.
Shadows are not the subject here, at all. The main problem here is the highly saturated colours coming from the led lighting causing strange, let's say, solarization effect. It is distracting. To avoid this you need to be aware of keeping your colours in gamut. I'm not a expert in this domain but usually you have to pay attention to your colour space and desaturate and/or rotate your colours.
Sure, but your missing how camera sensors react to saturation. Exposure and saturation go hand in hand. What you see here is the blue channel being so bright that it's over exposing that color channel. You could fix that by under exposing the image, but then you've thrown away all the detail in the shadows. You can't just magically recover an over exposed image by changing your color gamut. You have to have the detail in the first place which doesn't appear to be the case in OP's image. Simply desaturating the color in post doesn't change its exposure. You could lower the luminance for that color channel but again it wont bring back detail. Also, simply rotating colors won't do anything to fix clipping. I've run into this issue a ton with my own concert photography and the best solution is to just put white light on the subject to reduce the dynamic range.
Edit: OP stated the camera is an iPhone 17. Good luck getting the results you're expecting with that. OP also said the lights were static and unchanging. This is probably worst case scenario for this setup. OP did the best with what they had.
HDR and/or multi shot blending solve this, we are talking digital.
For what it's worth, you're both right, but there is no lighting designer here, this is a small venue hall not focused on photography but on mood. Tricks are all you can do here.
It’s Polaris Hall! It’s small enough that my janky ass is the only one with an ADA seat, but since its head up front and slightly to the right, I have one of the best vantage points for photography.
That is cool, the photos look great 😉
No, I'm not missing anything you say. Even if you under expose the blue channel will clip anyway. That is why there are fantastic tools (like those proposed in darktable for example) to deal with it : rotation of colours, desaturation and roll-offs to make nice transitions to white for the highlights. I mean I'm not talking out of my ass there is this great video that I shared just above.
Since I did my work in raw, I can prolly do the edits you’re requesting, but I posted the work I wanted to post. Sometimes the point of harsh light is to use harsh light. I do what I can with what I’ve got, and I made the choice to lean into the concert lighting.
You did great! Focus on framing and timing your shots then learn the technical details as you go. Don't worry about some random criticism on the internet