By Andre Costantini
Shooting live theatre, dance and music can be challenging when you start out. The most common problems have to deal with exposure and blur. Though technique is important, in this case so is the equipment. I recommend a 70-200 f2.8 lens. The combination of the telephoto focal length and fast f2.8 aperture make this THE lens for the technical conditions. The 70-200 f2.8 is also used on a regular basis by photojournalists and sports photographers because of these unique attributes. Theatre by nature is drama and so dramatic lighting is often used as an element to convey mood or to highlight a specific action. This will look fine to your eyes but not necessarily to your camera. In order to translate this to your images I have 5 tips to maximize the quality of your live performance images. The images featured here were taken this summer for the Boston Early Music Festival and their production of Niobe.
1. Concentrate on one moment. Sometimes trying to incorporate everything that is happening all at once is too much information. A lens like a Tamron 70-200 f2.8 is the ideal lens for shooting this type of thing.
2. Control your camera settings. Your camera's meter makes an exposure decision based on what it sees in the frame. Often, especially with theatre and dance, the backgrounds may have a lot of dark tones based on the theatre lighting. If you leave the camera to make the exposure decision you will have an image that is overexposed, where there is no detail in faces. I always set my camera on Manual exposure mode, then I look at the settings that the camera meter suggests (it's still on in Manual mode) and usually under expose the scene by at least one f-stop. This is a general rule but it depends based on the lighting design and what is in the frame. If there is a lot of dark in the frame you will need to compensate more.
3. Use wide apertures and high ISOs. Because theatre lighting is not usually extremely bright, I set my aperture to f2.8 (to let the most light in possible) and my ISO to between 800-1600. This usually gives me a fast enough shutter speed (between 125th and 500th) to get sharp images. If the shutter speed still is not fast enough you can up your ISO to 3200. If there is not enough light on stage and you have a slow lens, it will likely be difficult to get sharp images.
4. Shoot the dress rehearsal. Chances are that all you have to do is ask and you can get access to shoot the dress rehearsal. You should then have access to move around the theatre and the sound of your camera shutter will not disturb the other patrons. Make sure if you are shooting images for the company, it is a full dress rehearsal. I had a client who was paying me to shoot a dress rehearsal to send images to the press and was going to run it without costumes so the performers wouldn't sweat in their costumes. I had to remind them that the press prefers to have images in costume.
5. Try to catch peak action. Theatre and dance are blocked and choreographed to convey information, visually. If you can capture moments of peak action, where a gesture or a move conveys the spirit of the scene or defines a character, your images will be stronger.
It is very obvious that lighting is extremely important in theatrical presentations. For the reasons that, lighting creates time, emotion and many other factors. All of the lighting must come together for an overall look for the show.
Posted by: Lighting Hire | Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 05:55 AM