I’ve just shot the dress rehearsal for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. This was a brightly lit show, which was a nice  change for me. However, there was also extensive use of following spots which brought their own challenges. The light level twixt action in the spots and action beyond their reach typically varied by a stop or two. They had their own colour temperature too, of course, higher than that for the stage as a whole.

Expose for the actors in the spot and you lose detail in the periphery, expose for those without the spots and you risk burning out the main actors. In the end I went with the matrix metering which was a compromise resulting in quite a lot of post processing, both to pull back the highlights but also to fill the shadows. This tended to vary with composition and zoom setting so resulted in more tweaking than I’m used to. It wold probably have been better to use spot(!) metering on the leads to get the highlights at least sorted and then have only to pull up the shadows in PP.

Look carefully and you’ll spot (I’ve got to stop this…) quite a variation in white balance too, noticeable in the changing hue of the tavern wall  in different scenes. Again quite a lot of extra work in PP to get an acceptable balance between all the elements. It’s definitely worth it though.

Very many congratulations to Genny for her new position as Artistic Director of the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich.

Sometimes available light is not enough or is in the wrong place. The recent promo shoot I did for Hansel & Gretel was a reminder of why you should always have an alternative light source with you. As you will see from the pix, the subjects were effectively within a box, that was in the painting dock back stage. I wanted to make the pix as visually interesting as possible and to provide sub-editors with a variety of landscape and portrait aspect ratios to help with page layouts.  On camera flash wasn’t going to work either. The solution was to pop the flash unit on an adjacent step ladder and then use pocket wizard mini tt1 and flex tt5 units to trigger it remotely. I was not too concerned about the harsh shadows cast on the back of the booth as I considered they added to the theatricality of the subject.

The pix from both the Tuesday and Wednesday dress rehearsals of the Opera Warwick production of Hansel and Gretel are on display at the ashmorevisuals Facebook page. I’ll load them here, at Darkling Images, as soon as I get the chance.

Pix from Tuesday’s dress rehearsal of The Real Thing will be in the Galleries listing soon. I’ve also produced a Blurb book of the event, which can also be downloaded as as iBook.

Take a copy of  The Darkling Images Book with you, as it is now available for download in iBook format for your iPhone or iPad.

I begin with my usual comment that you can find more than you need about photographic exposure (luminance, incident light readings, exposure values, 18% reflectance, grey cards, the zone system…, HDR, etc. etc.) on the web. My aim is to focus on the stage situation, but I shall give a brief & annoyingly vague definition of my own.

A correct exposure is one in which the optimal amount of light from the most important elements of your composed shot reaches the camera sensor or film, whilst also respecting the dynamic range of the subject from brightest highlight to darkest shadow.

A correct exposure is a balancing act between the triumvirate of shutter speed, aperture and ISO. There is a reciprocity between them. Varying one requires compensatory settings in one or both of the others.

Which has the highest priority? It depends upon the current shot: I might need a smallish aperture for more depth of field to keep actors both upstage and downstage relatively sharp; I might need a fast shutter speed to ensure actors’ motion is not too blurred; or I might need a lower ISO value for higher quality (low noise) images for subsequent large size reproduction. Typically the shutter speed/aperture balance changes from scene to scene.

I don’t seem to get many brightly lit productions. Maybe running a website called Darkling Images has something to do with it. As a consequence I often don’t get much latitude in aperture and shutter combinations. Sometimes aesthetics come second to just capturing an image. Settings such as ISO 6400, an aperture of f2.8 and a shutter speed of 1/15 second are not uncommon. Depth of field can be quite small and the risk of motion blur quite large at these values. At least noise—with a full frame sensor and ‘proper’ i.e. adequate exposure—is not too intrusive. However, too little light and the consequent under exposure mean that the noise will leap out of the shadows and smoother you in a speckled slush.

More to follow …

I, like so many others, was deeply saddened to hear of the untimely death of Steve Jobs of Apple. I read of it on an iPad, just as I am writing these words on one. All of the thousands of stage and theatre images that I have taken have been processed on Apple iMacs or MacBooks and if I text or telephone you then it will be on an iPhone.

Yes, I confess that probably makes me an Apple and Jobsian fan-boy, but then I’ve had over thirty years of inculcation. A 48K Apple ][ running UCSD Pascal kicked things off in 1980, crunching numbers in my own ANOVA and t-test programs. I had one of the first Macintosh computers next, in 1984, with 128K RAM (yes, younger reader, that is K for kilobyte), before going on, the following year, to use a Lisa II to develop software for Macintosh. And so over the next two decades, I observed through their range of products, the vagaries of Apple success (and otherwise), culminating in Jobs providing the creative conduit for Jony Ive’s design genius. I am confident that the Jobsian prescience will continue, providing us with deeply desirable, useable and tactile products for decades to come.

Very many congratulations to Elliot Griggs, winner of the 2011 Francis Reid Award, Association of Lighting Designers.

A recent TV broadcast of Stage Talk included an interview with Fin Kennedy and I’m pleased to report that a number of my photographs from a production of his play ‘How to disappear completely and never be found’ were featured to illustrate his work. See http://www.stagetalk.tv/#/meet-the-playwright/4550883718. The interview begins at around 25 minutes 30 seconds.