The Visual Science Lab / Kirk: Apr 22, 2019

4.22.2019

A Production Photo from Zach Theater's "Klook and Vinette." A few different approaches to live theatre photography this week.

I'm back at work this week and having fun. I photographed the technical rehearsal for a play at Zach Theatre yesterday (Sunday, April 21st) and it was a nice change from doing the big production plays on the main stage. This play is a two person piece that the theater is doing on their much smaller, cozier and more intimate Kleberg Stage, a theater I've worked in since my very first assignment to shoot photographs for the theater.

Since the crew still needed to add some finishing touches to the stage set my brief was to concentrate on the actors and to get as many close shots as possible instead of getting our usual mix of wide, medium and tight shots. I was traveling light yesterday and I just packed in two Fuji X-H1 bodies and two lenses; the 16-55mm f2.8 and the 50-140mm f2.8. Both are great lenses which, on the X-H1 bodies, focus quickly, accurately and with a bit of authority. I tried shooting with both at around f4.0 for highest sharpness but never hesitated to drop down to f2.8 if the light was just too low. My ISO's ranged from 1,000 to 6,400; also dependent on the way each scene was lit.

For me the new "magic bullet" for my live theater work is my formula for the color profiles. I've been using the Eterna profile which is very, very flat. I also set the highlights and the shadows to -2 which gives me more detail in the highlights and also "lifts" the shadows a bit. I set the sharpening to minus one and the noise reduction to minus one as well. I'm also shooting Jpeg so I'm letting the camera blend all of these settings for me before I even get to post production in Lightroom.

When I open the files they are uniformly just a tad dark but I like that because I'm able to preserve all the infomation I want in the highlight areas. If you looked at the files I'm pulling into Lightroom you'd think they were a bit of a mushy mess but they are filled with the potential to do battle with the high prevailing lighting contrast of most stage lighting!!! I pull a representative file and get to work building an overall template that works for the most part with all the files I've shot this way. I pull up the exposure to get just the right levels (my taste) for flesh tones. I add a bit of contrast (maybe +10%) to put initial snap back into the files. Then it's the highlight slider which hangs in the range of minus 25 to minus 45. This allows for my increase in overall exposure without jeopardizing detail in white shirts, jackets or dresses. I pull up the shadow slider by +35 to +50 to open up additional detail in the shadows. The minus 1 for noise reduction in the camera helps keep files sharper while the minus 1 for sharpening keeps what noise there is from being accentuated in the baked in files.

I use the "clarity" slider to add contrast back into the mid-tone areas and then, if the stage crew has been extra (too) generous with the fog machines on the stage I add in a bit of help from Lightroom's "haze" filter. The final touch it to bring the flat color back up to a snappier level of saturation with the vibrance slider. This is supposed to be better for shots with people in them than using the saturation slider because the vibrance control is set up to protect flesh tones whereas the saturation controls are indiscriminate.

I tend to find an exposure/color balance for each flurry of action I want to capture and the shooting careful, slow bursts of 10 to 50 shots until I get exactly what I want. If nothing changes, lighting wise, over the duration of this short duration of action then I can apply the same settings to every image in the group with batch assignments (Sync Selected). Sometimes I can be consistent enough so that I'm only having to do ten or fifteen episodes of fine-tuning out of a group of over a thousand shots. On other days I'm not so lucky and I'm making small (or medium sized) tweaks to every ten or so files.

Once I like the look of everything I export all into a Smugmug.com gallery at their largest resolution and with the lowest compression. Everything goes out as an sRGB file because, well, they just work for everything with a screen as a target and if someone needs to print them I'm very confident that the production crew at the theater know how to convert to different profiles.

What I am doing differently tomorrow: I got a bunch of great "two shots" last night and I've already covered what's needed for public relations and advertising images so I'm giving myself some leeway to experiment a bit tomorrow. Instead of sitting down and close to center I've asked the stage manager to reserve five seats in the center of the top row in the center section. This will give me room to move a bit and even if I use the mechanical shutter on the camera the audience members are far enough to be out of my "audible splash zone." I'm moving up 12 or so rows so I can break out the Fujifilm 100-400mm zoom lens and try my luck making good compositions with greater compression. I'm planning on using the big lens and an X-H1 on a heavy duty Benro monopod to give me an extra bit of stabilization for the 90 minute long performance. It should be fun to practice with a lens that's still a bit foreign to me and I'm also planning to use it mostly wide open so I'll also be giving the camera's noise handling capabilities at ISO 6400 a trial by fire.

I'll bring along the 16-55mm for those times when I want to grab full width stage shots and when I also want to include the lighting truss overhead. And, once again, I'll get the full set of a gear into a convenient to carry backpack. By the end of Wednesday morning I should have a better understanding of just how well longer zooms can work for live theater production shots.

It's fun when stuff is (a tiny bit) outside my technical comfort zone; it generally means I'm learning something....