Photographing A Show

I will have the opportunity to photograph the local improv team this coming week. I will be photographing the live performances and possibly even the practice session. I was wondering if any of you have any tips so I can get good shots to help the team to promote their shows.

At the live shows, I have two options for where I can be that wouldn't get in the way too much of those enjoying the show. The first option is sitting in the front row on the end. I wouldn't be able to move around much, if at all, to get different angles, but I would be able to see and capture faces and expressions fairly well since the stage is at the same level as the first row. The second option would be more from above. I would be able to move around the entire upper level of the theater so I would have more angle options, but I would be looking down at the show.

I would really like to get some nice shots so that the improv team can try to generate some interest in their group and get a larger crowd. Any tips or suggestions would be helpful.

Pictures from the show

I was able to get some fairly good shots at the show. Here are a few of them.

#1


#2


#3


#4

Jessica,

Looks like you all had fun and you did well to boot!

Where were you sitting and with what and how did you take the pictures? Flash?

Asher

I was sitting in the first row in the left side (if your looking at the stage). I basically was sitting on the steps the whole time since that gave me better angle than the seats did. I used my Nikon D50 with a 18-50mm lens and only available light. I was not allowed to use flash as they didn't want me blinding the actors or the audience. I will be taking pictures again of this improv troupe this weekend.

Jessica Weight said:

I was sitting in the first row in the left side (if your looking at the stage). I basically was sitting on the steps the whole time since that gave me better angle than the seats did. I used my Nikon D50 with a 18-50mm lens and only available light. I was not allowed to use flash as they didn't want me blinding the actors or the audience. I will be taking pictures again of this improv troupe this weekend.

Click to expand...

Well, Jessica, we're nearly there! I'm wondering about the issues of how to take pictures without disturbing the performance. What ISO, shutter speed and f stop? You obviously managed pretty well!

You were lucky they allowed you on the stairs as fire regulations generally forbid that!

Asher

Asher,
They are going to allow me to take pictures during their workshop tonight as well, but those aren't held on stage and don't have the same energy. I should be able to get some good shots tonight though. As for sitting on the stairs, I probably shouldn't have been, but people were able to walk past me and no one said anything so I didn't worry about it.
Honestly, I'm not sure what I had my ISO set to, but after talking to a co-worker, who also happens to do photography on the side like me, I realized that I should probably shoot at a high ISO so I'm going to change that before shooting again. As for shutter and F-stop, I'm sad to say that I have no idea what I was shooting at. I tried to do shutter priority and apeture priority on my camera but neither allowed the shutter speed to be nearly fast enough. I instead used the sports setting as that allowed the shutter speed to be much faster (although still not as fast as I would have liked).

Jessica,

Do you have another lens? Best a 50mm prime lens which is likely f 1.4 or 1.8. You could be shooting at f 3.5 and then your shutter speed would be faster. I routinely shoot at that or even up to wide open but re focus and keep shooting!

Your focal length settings on your Nikon Zoom were 35mm, 55mm, 46mm and 55mm for "Dead Bodies", "Por041", "Bad Advice" and "Heidi" respectively.

The speeds were in order, 1/25, 1/6, 1/30 and 1/10 seconds and the f stops 1.8,5.6, 5.3 and 1/10 sec. All were 800 ISO except for Per041 which was 200, explaining the 1/6 second!

So just opening the aperute would help. Is that an image stabilized lens? I don't know the term for the Nikon system. I think you were fortunate that there was a well lit stage!

Are you shooting RAW?

Now despite everything I'm fussing about you got great pictures anyway. Still the whole problem with light levels in performances and flash not being allowed is important.

This particular location was one thing. Try in a dark club!

Asher

Asher,
I do have another lens, but can't remember at the moment what the focal length is. I'll have to check when I get home. The problem with the other lens is that it is sort of a telophoto lens so I can't get shots of the player's bodies if I sit where I've been sitting. I can go higher in the theatre, but then I couldn't get a good angle for facial expressions. I don't know if the lens is an image stablized lens. I'll have to look into that as well. I'm not shooting in RAW at the moment because I don't have photoshop and don't know how to to a RAW conversion without it. I would love to be able to shoot in RAW, but I'm still pretty new at this and haven't had time to research how to work with RAW files.

I would love to try different locations, but at the moment, this is the only location this improv troupe goes to. They want to start doing performances at schools and other locations and I'll probably go with them when they do that.

I took some more shots this weekend. Here are a few of the ones that stood out to me. No editing has been done on these at all yet. I sat right in front of the stage in the center this time because I was trying to get more face shots.

1.


2.


3. This was one of the players doing a victory dance.


4.

If flash is allowed, then I would suggest using bounce flash (or off camera wireless) and then dragging the shutter (slow flash sync) to get reasonably sharp detail with a nice dash of ambient lighting to capture the feeling of the show. With the right balance of flash and ambient exposure one can also capture some nice motion blur too.

The technique takes practice and you will get a lot of misses with dragging the shutter, but the shots that work are spectacular w/ the color and energy they can capture.

As to locales to shoot from, if you have a fast enough long zoom then I would use that from the back. Then you can also capture shots showing the audience and the show (pictorial reality shots) which are one of my favorites.

Albeit, for performance work I like makeup shots the best.

Now we are moving! Thanks Sean!

Would you like to explain for people the dragging of shutter and settings! Also what creative leeway do you have and how do you manage that.

Asher

I could probably arrange with the troupe a time to do a photo shoot with flash. It would probably have to be at one of their workshops so there wouldn't be an audience, but I might be able to get better lighting that way as well. I'm also working on getting a posed group shot and head shots of all the players.

I would like to know more about how to go about dragging the shutter. I don't have a much experience working with flashes at all (I usually just play with it until it works for what I'm doing), so any tips or advice you could give me would be helpful.

Jessica Weight said:

I could probably arrange with the troupe a time to do a photo shoot with flash.
... so any tips or advice you could give me would be helpful.

Click to expand...

Hi Jessica,

Give me a day or so to respond as I am still trying to figure out how to write this up from a wider perspective such that it will work as a basis for a wider scoped article (and I need to hunt down some example images and my archives are typical*).

all the best,

Sean

* Humongous.