Stage Shows - rehearsal photos - WildLight Photography

Stage Shows – rehearsal photos

tony
April 28, 2019
Stage

Remote camera with wide-angle lens showing cast and orchestra.

Following on from my previous post on photographing stage shows, this week we are looking at rehearsal photos. Attending and photographing rehearsal is a crucial part of the process for me. I dislike staged shots so want to get a feel for a show and try to capture still images of the actors in action that tell part of the story. In wildlife and sport photography you need to watch the action and try and predict what is about to happen to record a moment that tells the story. Stage shows, once you know the plot, are predictable so in that regard much easier. My approach when attending a rehearsal for the first time is to treat is as sports event and try to react to the action as it happens and record the moments. I then have a visual memory of the action and a sequence of images as a reminder. When I attend the dress rehearsal to get shots for the programme and front of house display I usually have a clear plan in my head of what shots I need and know when they are going to happen in the course of the show.

My preference is to be as unobtrusive as possible so usually work with a camera body and 70-200mm f2.8 lens on a tripod in the auditorium which gives a director’s view of the show. In addition I use a remote camera with a wide-angle lens on a tripod nearer the stage. The remote camera is controlled with a radio trigger so I can operate both cameras at the same time. Exposure is the biggest challenge with stage lighting as the intensity and colours can be very variable. The important thing is not to overexpose anything so I usually work in manual mode with exposure set for the brightest light which is the follow-spots. The rehearsal I photographed last night gave me 1/250s at f2.8 with ISO1600. With modern sensors the dynamic range makes shadow recovery relatively easy and without too much cost in noise. Noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom has essentially made 3rd party noise reduction plugins obsolete. My original Noise Ninja plugin that I used to use for stage shows is no longer even available.

Same scene at dress rehearsal from the auditorium.

Same scene at dress rehearsal from the wide-angle remote camera gives achoice of images to use. — Same scene at dress rehearsal from the wide-angle remote camera gives a choice of images to use.

The most time-consuming part of the process is going through the images to make the selection to process from RAW files. Once done most can be edited quickly by copying and pasting settings from one file to the next in Lightroom. Adjustments need to be made between scenes with significant lighting changes but once the settings have been adjusted they can then be used for the next batch of images with that lighting set-up. I then export the processed RAW images directly from Lightroom as 8x12in jpeg files that can be used for the programme or front of house display. Without Lightroom’s batch processing and folder export capability handing each file through Photoshop would be extremely time-consuming and frustrating.

Slow shutter barricade scene from Les Miserables.

With many of the shows I have photographed previously I have had the opportunity to photograph a number of rehearsal and so have had the chance to try some more creative approaches to some scenes using slow shutter speeds which would be too high risk to consider with only one of two dress rehearsals to photograph.