LED help!!!

OK, so I snap my husband's band's gigs and they played a new club this weekend that had horrible LED lights. First it was messing with my glasses (unless looking straight through the middle of them they distorted the image strangely making it harder to see what I was doing.) But metering. Crap that was the hardest thing I've shot in a long time. There seems to be no middle, it's all highlights and darks. Not sure what to meter off since they were different colors and seemed to really mess with my meter (in camera.)

Any suggestions as to how to meter right? I'm not good at this kind of photography to begin with, but I'd like to be able to get better shots then I did Saturday. The place loved the band and wants them back soon, my husband also said that a lot of people are going over to LEDs since that's almost the only kind of lighting you can buy from the normal places that these small venues buy from.

here's an example (this is one of the better shots of the night)

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

Would it be possible to put up some off-camera speedlights?

Its better to shoot raw and edit using a good RAW editor and start messing around with the Calibration slider.

I would expose for the brightest highlight and push it to the right as much as possible without losing detail. Shoot raw and try and get back as much as you can from the shadows.

I wonder of the ones advising to shoot RAW have ever shot when LED lights are used? Yes, shoot RAW but there is something about LED lighting that the camera cannot resolve, pale faces glow often silver, dark faces glow purple when the "white" or "clear" LEDs are used. Anyone doing lights will know to not use LEDs on the faces, they are fine for backdrops, rigging etc. Unfortunately since LEDs are cheap to buy, cheap to rent and use little power, they are being used more and more in small clubs and IMO will ruin photography in those venues. Get ready to see a lot of very edgy looking B&W conversions.

Yep. And threads like this one:
https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=15037974#po​st15037974

This is fascinating. LED lights don't cycle the way fluorescent lights do, so that must mean that the camera is favoring or simply picking one of the multicolored LEDs to color balance off of. I've seen some LED stage lights that have an RGB array of colored LEDs to theoretically "make" white light. I guess our cameras don't seem them as blended light and pick one to favor, making one white and the others colored.

I kind of want to play with LED lighting now. In any case, I would say there is no fix for this. If you mix a lot of drastically different colored lights you can't find a middle ground for white balance.

LEDs are unusual in that they're single spectrum. E.g. a blue LED is just blue - it's not a mix of other colours. Having said that I've had no problems shooting small venues that use them.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/richarris/88081​95098/