A very interesting mix of Live Theater, Still Photography and Video. How big is big?

Image from Zach Scott Production. 

Everything changes all the time. When I first started photographing for Zachary Scott Theater we used medium format cameras and black and white film. The reason? None of the local newspapers, magazines or tabloids ran stuff in color. Color film was slow and grainy and hard to use under mixed stage lights. But with quick reflexes and some darkroom work the medium format Tri-X film could produce nice prints for the media. Last night some of dress rehearsal documentation was done with two pint sized Sony Nex 7 cameras.

While the theater has used projectors for quite some time the show, Mad Beat Hip and Gone, is the first production we've done that uses screens of this size (over 30 by 30 feet) and so ubiquitously integrates video and still photographic imagery into the DNA of the play.  The image above shows the size of the screen in relation to the actors very well. 

 This image incorporates video on the background screen. 

Apparent sharpness in motion comes from persistence of vision.

Since we've "frozen" a video frame it appears 

less sharp that it  appears in the continuity of the video....

The incorporation of moving video, some in slow motion, as well as still images post processed to mimic the look of the time (1950's), added so much visual depth to an already well written play. 

We shot the still images and the video inserts with a Sony a99 Digital camera and a Sony 70-200mm 2.8G lens. The black and white effect was done, in camera, during the initial capture (no turning back!) and the lighting for the stills and videos was done with LED panels modified with a large, one stop silk over the main light.

As more directors take advantage of new technologies (getting the images this large with a short distance behind the screen required that we use two projectors and stitch the images across both machines...) we'll definitely see more and more uses of creative stills and video to add layers of complexity, meaning, texture and nuance to performances. It's becoming a hybrid world for us out there. We might as well just call ourselves, "Creative Content Providers."

Mad Beat Hip and Gone, now at Zach Scott Theater.

I finally took Andy's advice and tried a file conversion in Aperture.

Shot with LED Light Panels for Zachary Scott Theatre.

Camera: Sony a99 with 70-200mm 2.8 G lens.

I don't want to start a war about which RAW converter is best. God knows, there are more than enough religions out there already, but I wanted to share that some files work better in RAW converters we might not have been using in our own workflows. Since I switched to Sony cameras I've felt that Lightroom 4.4 was just about as good as anything out there for conversions so I didn't look around much. I mean, Adobe Camera Raw is considered by most image workers as the standard of the industry.

But recently I picked up a Sony a850 camera (more about that whole deal on another day) and I shot a bunch of portraits with it. The images looked great on the LCD screen on the back of the camera and there wasn't anything really challenging about the lighting or the subjects, but once I pulled the raw files into Lightroom my stomach kind of tightened up. The images were contrasty and for some reason LR wanted to add 12 to 15 points of magenta to the faces in my portraits. Well actually the default seemed to be, "the more magenta everywhere, the better!"

I worked and worked on the files but I was not happy. So I opened Capture One and messed around with 7.0. Better but still not in the "happy camper" ballpark. A quick and disastrous detour through Sony's primitive program didn't help my mood at all. Frankly, I was ready to go back to film and throw the whole mess at a lab. Right....

Then I remembered that my friend, Andy, swears by Apple's Aperture. And his images always look great to me. Great contrast, believable sharpness and great color. And he swears he uses nothing but Aperture. For $79 bucks and a quick download I'll bite.

I re-learned (I'd tried the 1.0 demo a few years back) everything I needed to do the job at hand in about an hour. I tweaked the images and they fell into place without the slightest glitch, color cast or posterization in the shadows. The sharpening worked better and the color controls made the flesh tones....perfect. I batched them and they're spitting into a folder as I write this.

But then I started wondering about the image above. I posted a version earlier that started life in LR and I wasn't totally happy with the contrast and the overall look of the image. Since Aperture is a multi-thread application I tossed this image file into the program and started playing with it. To my eye it's a totally different image now. I could see a big difference in the way the program made the initial conversion and how well it works with Sony files.

I'm not saying that your Nikon or Canon or Olympus camera will necessarily see the same kinds of improvements that I saw in the files from two different full frame Sony cameras but if you are using an Apple machine it may be worth your while. Particularly if you feel less than thrilled with the stuff that's coming out of your current workflow.  Just a thought.

ed note: look what popped up this morning over at DP Review: review.com/articles/8219582047/raw-converter-showdown-capture-one-pro-7-dxo-optics-pro-8-and-lightroom-4