Concert pics -- I'm missing something

[sds4kst8]

Was pumped about getting to shoot my first concert in many years and feel like I totally blew it. Nearly everything was washed out. How in the world do you meter a concert? I used auto WB, but don't think that really would have helped. In most of the pics the colors look fine (at least I think they do), but anything that had a white spotlight on it was a wash.

I'm almost embarassed to even display these two, but I truly am looking for suggestions and help on how to keep this from happening in the future. They were shot at 1/60, f4 ISO800. These particular shots were taken from the back of the arena with a 70-200. I had access and shot right in front of the stage, but the faces in those pics are nothing but white blobs!

BTW...these pics have had nothing done to them except resizing for this post. No levels adjustment, sharpening, etc.

Thanks for your help.

http://www.pbase.com/image/25801504.jpg

http://www.pbase.com/image/25801505.jpg[/img]

[Kell]

Hmm, what was your motivation for using ISO800? That's as sensitive to light as it gets, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they look washed. With that sensitivity, and in a situation where you can expect spotlights, 1/60 is also a lot of exposure time. I suggest you play around a bit with exposure times and ISO sensitivity - I'd say that ISO above 400 would be mostly for close/macro shots though.

It seems that the crowd is in the dark, so maybe you were deceived by the fact that you were in a dark place, whereas in fact the stage wasn't? I suppose that with those settings you could have taken pictures from the public, but shooting at the performers in the spotlight with those settings was really likely to yield such results.

Just my 2 cents of opinion. :)

[Leighow]

Well there are lots of concert posts on the forum.

Excluding the washed out skins in spot light, the mood gets killed (relative to other posts) as it turns the scene (at these brightness levels) into something that looks more like a practice session with "lights on".

I'd guess that you are at least 4 stops over.

But even if you were dead on, the stage is not really "engineered" to give you great mood or mood lighting. My memory wanted more lights behind the stage and coloured and cutting thru the mist.

PS: (Edit)

Don't forget to check the in-camera histogram -- that should be a dead give away!

[msol]

Thing that comes to my mind is that the exposure seems to have been metered for the entire image. For concerts, often, one shoots a pic of a singer or guitar player. So, then it might be better to use spot-metering. For example on the face. That would prevent the white blob faces. It makes the rest of the photo black, but also draws attention to the subject.
Also I noticed for your second pic that the focus seems to be on the back wall and not on the subject. (Also happens to me too often :? )

Does this make sense?