Some advice if you may?

Eirebear

Hi guys, just me wanting to pick your brains again!
I was able to take a few shots today at a seminar in Glasgow were the key speaker was Stuart Cosgrove...head of regions or something or other for channel 4.
Anyway, the room was fairly dark as to allow for his slide show presentation and this caused me a few problems as the bright light of the projector screen coupled with the darkened room played havoc with my exposure....either exposing the screen and having the speaker in the shadows, or having the speaker exposed with a huge white empty glare behind him.
has anyone got any advice on how to combat this?

Anyway heres the couple ive manna to "save" so far.

PopeBuckfastXVI

How far away were you?

Fill flash maybe?

Eirebear

Hi Pope, I was really quite close.
These were taken with 100mm f2.
it was a very small "intimate" affair with a maximum of 40 people in attendance so i felt flash was a bit of a no-no tbh.

Sebzy

Hope you shot RAW if not shoot RAW next time and expose for the shaddows and pull the rest back in ACR or equivalent.

Eirebear

Sebzy wrote: »

Hope you shot RAW if not shoot RAW next time and expose for the shaddows and pull the rest back in ACR or equivalent.

Yep Shot RAW, always shoot RAW.
The best im getting at the minute is, as you said, the ones where i exposed for the speaker, then by dropping the contrast to catch some of the detail and doing some work with the Curves and levels in PS.

Seems to be working so far anyway.

mikeanywhere

Expose for the person and then if the background is a tad bright then use some fiddly photoshop stuff to fix.

Eirebear

yeah that seems to be the way its worked best, was just wondering if there was maybe anything i was missing.
Cheers guys

Borderfox

You could do a HDR with the single RAW file?

Eirebear

Borderfox wrote: »

You could do a HDR with the single RAW file?

Could work, i dont tend to like the results of this kind of processing though.
Also, ive never personally tried it before so the chances are the results would be crap...might give it a try if i get some time though

Roen

There's certain situations that you can't win in.
There's only so much dynamic range that photographic media has, and when you go beyond those boundaries you unfortunately run into problems like this.

Flash was the obvious answer here, but as you said it was a no-no....so that rules that out.

The only thing I would have suggested here was move so that there wasn't such a big difference between the background and subject. But then again, is walking about the place less or more intrusive than popping off a flash from time to time?

Eirebear

cheers everyone...i just paniced a little when the lights went down and i started trying to expose (i really dont know what i was expecting now that i think about it:o).
Anyway alls well that ends well and ive sent a selection of the shots, theyve emailed me back to tell me theyre using the top one for their website so turns out i neednt have worried about the rest!
Thanks again everyone

Fionn

it's always going to be a challenge in a situation like that, I suppose flash isn't appropriate at something like that, i'm sure your man wouldn't be too pleased with a flash going off at a venue like that.
Anyway you did well to get what you did - if it's RAW you can do all sorts of stuff to it anyway.
I'd like to have a go even just at the pic as it's there