I have on occasion been bumping into DJs the last year that have an array of LED lights which they use to flood the dance floor, sometimes with no other light source at all (especially outdoor weddings). Cameras unfortunately can’t deal with this yet as pictures easily gets overexposed on a single, mono-chrome color. Faces get washed out in blue, green, red, yellow, cyan, or magenta, and contain no depth in them. Just an outline of the face remains. I’ve tried many things:
- Underexposing the image. This doesn’t always work as there sometimes isn’t enough light (I live on the Cote d’Azur and have quite a few wedding outside)
- Adding flashes: This only works if the subjects are 1-2 meters from a flash. I’ve been competing with LED arrays 3 meters long. Speedlights aren’t powerful enough to compete with that.
- Adding gels on flashes to add the opposite color(s): This only works if there’s just a single color of the LED array (which hasn’t been the case so far).
- Post processing: This helps a little, but it doesn’t get close to a satisfactory result.

So far my best solution has been to add flashes all around the perimeter of the enlightened area, one on my flash, a second flash in my hand, and take pictures of subjects not too far from any of my flashes (i.e. sticking to the outer areas of the dance floor). Some shots can be taken with a flash on a camera stuck to a monopod and remotely triggering it when holding it (close) above a group of people, but you don’t want to be doing this all evening long. The solutions of asking the DJ to stop using those lights and/or to add a permanent strong light (which destroys the atmosphere are not solution for me.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how else to cope with these lamps?