Why do these lights show up so differently on camera?

September 12, 2023 9:54 AM

I am at an event that is using those light bulb letters. In the room the individual bulbs are clearly visible. But on screen with the video feeds on the monitors the letters are just a solid white. Why? How?

I checked it with my own phone camera and they appear solid white there as well so it isn't video processing.

posted by jacquilynne to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

It's just blown out. If you go into Pro mode on your phone's camera, and set the ISO to 200 and then crank the shutter speed super high, like 1/2000, you'll see the bulbs.
posted by andrewzipp at 10:05 AM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

What andrewzipp said. When your camera is set to "see" everything else in the room as normally lit, the intensity of the light bulbs themselves makes them look wayyyy blown out. Conversely, if you do what andrewzipp mentions (set your camera so you can see the bulbs), everything else in the room will look really dark.
posted by Rykey at 11:36 AM on September 12, 2023

If dimming the bulbs in the letters is possible, that may get them to look alright on camera, but it may have to be very dim. Or brighter lights to bring up the lighting on the people/stage.

Otherwise hdr / exposure bracketing and compositing may work if the subjects aren't moving and you only need stills.
posted by TheAdamist at 11:42 AM on September 12, 2023

Response by poster: I don't need to fix it, am just attending the conference. I just couldn't understand how it was happening - they look so smooth and plastic in the video and nothing like what they look like on the actual stage.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:46 AM on September 12, 2023

Our eyes can see more dynamic range (difference of dark to light) in the world than a camera can capture. The camera adjusts its settings to get the average scene lighting exposed correctly, and in this case, the entire inside of the letters (bulbs and interior surfaces) are both brighter than the top end of the exposure range (this is called "blown out" in photography speak), so they basically will look all white.
posted by Quiscale at 1:37 PM on September 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

To add to that, if you adjusted the camera so that the individual bulbs were visible, the rest of the scene would be much darker, often completely black. Because you've shifted the narrow dynamic range to fit the bright white lights in, at the expense of darker parts of the scene.

Some cameras can/will try to compensate for this by combining multiple exposures, with different settings, into a single "High Dynamic Range" (HDR) image so that both the bright parts and light parts are visible in a way closer to how our eyes and brain see.
posted by fabius at 4:26 AM on September 13, 2023

Response by poster: The official photos of the event, which were taken by an actual photographer with an actual (presumably digital) camera do show the individual lightbulbs a lot of the time, but never as clearly as lightbulbs as they were when you were in the room. And even the blown out photos are never as smoothly blown out as the images appeared on video or on my phone camera. The result in these photos is actually much, much less appealing than either the live view or the fully blown-out view.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:24 AM on September 14, 2023