This week we are taking a brief departure from the Antarctica travelogue. I have been very busy photographing the John Paul College production of Beauty and the Beast which opened in the Civic Theatre of the Sir Howard Morrison Performing Arts Centre on Friday night. This is the fifth major production I have covered for the school but the first time that Edin hasn’t been involved in the production. The last one was in 2011 when she played the leading female role of Natalie/Ed in the musical All Shook Up. This time, with no family involved,  was a little different but just as much fun and less stressful as we didn’t have any opening night nerves. Have a look at the show galleries to see all the rehearsal photos and cast portraits. The costumes and props created by Weta Workshop of Lord of the Rings and Hobbit fame are quite astounding.
Photographing a production is always a big project which spans a couple of months as we need to get some early rehearsal shots to lay out the programme, head shots of all the cast, crew, backing vocals etc and then at the last-minute get dress rehearsal photos taken and processed for the programme printing deadline before getting final dress rehearsal photos processed and printed to make up display boards for the foyer on opening night. As a result my last couple of weekends and all last week has been occupied photographing or processing images, getting prints made and then creating the four display boards in time for 6pm Friday. Once done it was time to relax and enjoy the pre-show function and opening performance which was great fun. Edin is heading home next weekend for the final show which will bring back fond memories for us all of the 4 shows she performed in.
Photographically stage shows are a challenging subject with difficult lighting to manage due to high contrast, variable intensity and colours. My go to lens has always been the 70-200 f2.8 on a full frame body gimbal mounted on a tripod. I found the D700/D3s to be great for their high ISO performance but the last 2 shows I have done have been with the D800 and D810 as their performance at 3200 and even 6400 ISO is amazing when down sized to 8x12in and the dynamic range better than the D3s. The highlight priority metering of the D810 is a definite help in dealing with the metering.
Processing has always been done in Lightroom before finishing in Photoshop but this time with Lightroom CC I did everything in Lightroom before exporting 8×12, 6×4 and 800px versions for print and web and found this perfectly adequate and a great time saver. I did use FastRawViewer to quickly review images and found this a quick way of selecting the images that were worth spending time processing. Lightroom is slow to render large raw files and I have it set up to render previews after downloading which is great if you can just leave it before having to start previewing images to select. If there is time pressure to get the selects chosen FastRawViewer is incredibly fast and the focus peaking display option helps rapidly show sharp images. Selected images can be moved to a “Selects” folder with a keyboard shortcut and rejects can similarly moved to a “Rejected” folder for easy deletion. I can see this as being very useful on a laptop when travelling to quickly edit keepers from a shoot.
This article from the Daily Post promoting the show has some more information and another photo.
