A celebration of silliness. Jill Blackwood stars in Zach Scott's Presentation of Xanadu.

http://www.zachtheatre.org/show/xanadu

Zachary Scott Theatre never does anything halfway. When they do a campy musical they pull out all the stops and rev up the camp. This week the Theatre opens their version of Xanadu.  This isn't your 1980's movie version either. This is a magnificent spoof-musical that made me laugh so much the image stabilization in my cameras was working overtime. 

Last night my trusty video producer, Ben Tuck, and I headed over to Zachary Scott Theatre to do some work.  Ben was there scouting locations for a video project. He was also shooting some general "B" roll during the dress rehearsal.  I was there to shoot images for the local newspaper and for Zach Scott's marketing department. I ended up with about 1855 images but many of those are similar shots with different gestures and expressions. That's why shooting people, portraits and events is so frame intensive...you might like one sort of expression and the art director might prefer another.  You shoot both.  And while you're shooting you get the expression in front of you because it might be the best one, until the next one happens and you get that one because it's even better (and on and on).

While I covered all the actors in the show I decided I'd show only Jill Blackwood in this set of blog selections.  Jill is wonderful on stage and her singing and incredible action made the show for me.  In this role she is the team leader of the original Greek muses who ends up falling in love with a mortal artist.  A big, Mount Olympus No-No.  I love the way Zach's Xanadu is propped, lit and costumed.  

Ben shot his video with a Sony a57 with the kit 18-55mm lens and his Gitzo tripod with Manfrotto fluid head.  I shot with two Sony a77s.  I used one with the 16-50mm lens (which, along with the cheap 85mm, is my current favorite optic).  On the other camera I shot with both the 85mm 2.8 and the 70-200mm G 2.8 lens.  The lighting on this production was fairly bright, with lots of follow spots on Jill, so I was able to keep the ISO in the range of 400 to 800.

Everything I shot was handheld. Everything you see here is straight out of camera with no PhotoShop chicanery or lily-gilding.  

I love the musical and all the 1980's music has gone from nostalgic to kitsch and now is just flat out funny.  Yes, I'll line up for tickets.

One more thing.  Shooting theatre with a big, bright, detailed EVF is the only way to go.  Believe me, I've done it both ways....

Available LIght Photos of Zach Scott Theater's Spelling Bee Play/Musical

Two images from the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
(click on the pix to seem em larger).

Shooting theater productions is fun. Or it should be. Actors are acting, someone else has done all the lighting for you and there's lots of contrast with pools of bright, intense light and equal areas of stygian darkness.

I've written before that taking good photographs of a live production helps hone your reflexes and pushes you to anticipate action. My problem yesterday was that I paid too much attention to the play. And it was hilarious, which made me laugh, which made the little steam engines, or whatever makes Image Stabilization work go into over time.

The play is hilarious. But between bouts of paralyzing laughter I felt duty bound to get some sharp, well exposed images that the theater could use in the newspaper to sell tickets.

First thing I did was figure out a good white balance which is harder than it sounds because some lights are standard whites while others were gelled blue and others yellow. In fact the white balance changed by quadrants on the stage. I tried to figure it out and settled on a custom compromise. 3600K.

Seems to have worked out pretty well. In the old, old days I might have brought a color temperature meter but I'm equally sure it would have been useless since I would never have had the right filter packs with me to effect the proper change, and, if I did the resulting filter pack would have sapped precious photons from film I was already planning to push process.

I brought two cameras with me because I'm always certain that the one time I come with a solo imaging machine will be the one time Murphy's law cripples it and leaves me with no options. Last night it was pair of Olympus cameras, the e30 ( a darling camera with lots to recommend it) and the e520 (which doesn't focus as accurately as I would like with an f2 lens in the dark but is cheap as dirt and works well outside......). I used the e30 with my new "favorite/how did I ever live without/OMG/gush lens, the 35-100mm f2. Sounds kind of stubby but when you remember that we Olympus shooters got shortchanged on chip size (just kidding oh brethren...) the whole thing kinda factors out into a 70-200 f2, which is something special.

If you don't shoot Olympus you've probably got a genuine 70-200mm in your bag so you know how much fun that grab bag of focal lengths can be when you are standing stage size and trying to get "two shots", "three shots", and a few random close up solo portraits. And I know that your D700, D3, 5D is less noisy than my e30 but I also know I'm shooting a stop wider than you.....

I figured I'd be pretty noise free if I stayed around ISO 800 so I tuned up the camera and got to work. The lighting was such that I spent most of the evening shooting at f2.5 in between 1/250th and 1/500th of a second. Combine that with the nifty four stop IS in the body and you've got a pretty interesting handful. For the few times I needed to go wider I grabbed on old, battered 14mm-54mm and made due at f3.5. Not glamorous but workable.

There's not much I'd change about the e30 body. The finder is nice, the displays are good and the controls are positive. The one thing I would change about the e520? I'd make it into another e30. We'll see about that over the weekend....

The theatrical gods of photography graced me last night by allowing me to shove all my images on one 4 gigabyte card. That sure makes burning a DVD for the marketing director an easier task. I slogged home around 11 pm still chuckling about the one "home schooled" character in the play who "makes his own clothes and even makes capes for his cats".

I've been shooting for Zach Scott Theater for 17 years now and I would say that I've benefitted more from the relationship than the theater has. They keep me constantly working on technique, introduce me to theater that is challenging and new (and which I wouldn't have the insight to find on my own...) they introduce me to incredible talent (who are easily recruited as models) and they throw fabulous parties.

In addition to all that they send out several hundred thousand printed pieces a year to the upscale demographic in our town. With my credit line prominently displayed. It's really nice marketing. If you haven't thought about shooting a little theater stuff in your town you might consider. Could be good all around.

Two thumbs up for the 35-100 and the e30.

Low Light Workout at the Photon Gym.....

One thing you have to say about the D700 is that it works very well in light so low you can't read the dials on the camera body.

I like shooting dress rehearsals for Zachary Scott Theater.  If a play is not exactly my taste (a rare occurrence at Zach...) I at least have the technical challenge of rendering it with good technique.  

When a play is  good I feel the challenge with more weight.  When a play is really good I want to share all the things that made it special to me.

I recently shot the advertising images for the "Grapes of Wrath" during the dress rehearsal.  I was just amazed at the use of light in this production.  You can see in the photographs that the lighting designer used a limited palette of warm tones for most of the scenes.  I don't know if you can tell from the images but it evokes the hot dusty feeling that must have pervaded the "dust bowl" in the middle of America in the 1930's.  The light was so well done it transported me into the scene and the milieu.  In many theaters lighting directors, because of their limited inventory of lights, make use of a few hard spots and a handful of gels.  This set was literally as intricately lit as a blockbuster movie set.

I shot most of the action with a Nikon D700 and a handful of prime lenses.  My primary optic was Nikon's inexpensive 85mm f/1.8.  A wonderful lens that's often overlooked in the mad rush to have the fastest glass.

Checking the IPTC data shows that I set the camera at ISO 3200 and used the lens at f/3.2 with a shutter speed of around 1/25oth of a second.  

I also shot with a Fuji S5 but none of 
those images made the cut for one reason or another.  I have one complaint about the D700.  I don't think it focuses as well as the D300. It may be the spacing of the sensors or my own ineptitude but I hunts every now and then when I least expect it.

Someone will ask about my workflow in these situations and I want to talk about that because I'm of two minds when it comes to shooting theater.  If we had a big budget for post production I would probably want to
shoot every frame as a 14 bit uncompressed raw file. But the budget is all but non-existent.  Then there is the advantage that, with the D700, the camera corrects for the weaknesses of any attached lens by tweaking out any chromatic fringing, but it's only automatic in the Jpeg setting.  This feature makes the 85mm f/1.8 lens sharper and better than it used to be.

I usually set the WB at 3000-3200 as all the lights in the theater start life as tungstens, though most of them are gelled.

The other reality is a time constraint.  The marketing director needs the images as quickly as we can produce them.  The goal is always to shoot on Weds. and get the images to our daily paper on Thurs. afternoon.  In a typical rehearsal shoot I'll take 1200 to 1500 images.  If we processed raw files individually it would take an enormous amount of time.  That's why it's important to me to get things right in the camera.  While I'm shooting.  All the files I've placed here are untouched jpegs shot at the highest quality settings.

While I may screw up ten or fifteen percent of the shots I generally end up with at least a thousand usable images for the the marketing team.

As tough as it is to capture the action under low light, with constantly moving actors, my client is very happy with my work. The digital cameras do make things easier but in writing this I'm thinking through the process and reminding myself that the "feel" for the flow of a show and being able to anticipate action is more important than the camera gear.  

In fact,  in days past we've shot the shows with Leica M cameras and color transparency film and consistently had images published in the national theater magazines.  Our favorite way to roll back then was to use Kodak 320T slide film, pushed one stop in the processing to ISO 640 and shot as though it was ISO 500.  Spot meter around the neck along with two rangefinder bodies.  One sported a 35mm Summicron and the other a 75 mm 1.4 Summilux.  

You had to be able to feel your camera in the dark and know what your settings were.  And you had to know when there were  subtle light changes so you could meter again and hope the settings stayed the same for a few minutes.

In some regards shooting theater remains the same.  The spot meter is king and we keep the camera in full manual exposure mode.  There are just too many dark spots on stage to depend on automatic settings.  And when the light is all but gone manual focusing becomes mandatory.  I'll say one thing,  shooting live theater certainly keeps your photo reflexes in shape.

By the way, double clicking on the images will show them at 1200 pixels. Thanks for reading.  

P.S.  Fashion note:  If you shoot live events you might think to wear as much black as possible so that you blend into the darkness and not distract the actors or speakers.  I even wear a black baseball cap now that I'm dying my hair a bright silver.....  :-)

See more work:   Kirk Tuck's Commercial Website/An adventure in iWeb