Shooting Theater Part II

Here's a quick list of tips for shooting theater.

-Always shoot RAW. Lighting conditions are pretty extreme: high contrast. changing lights and colors, hard shadows. You WILL be doing a lot of recovery in post with details in highlights, shadows, and white balance.

-Shoot in bursts. People blink faster than you shoot.

-Focus manually. While auto-focus is useful in other situations, I find that it's too slow, inaccurate, and inconsistent in theater.

-Theater is dark. Shutter speed, ISO, and aperture all have pros and cons that need to be weighed against each other to catch the most light.

-Shutter Speed: shoot as close to 1/50 as you can. Slower means more light while introducing blur. Faster means freezing fast moves but losing light. While blurry shots are cool, very few to no photos used to commercially market and actually advertise performances have motion blur in them. Dancing often needs 1/125 and higher.

-Aperture: I start with F2.8. Below F2.8 brings more light, but it becomes harder to focus with a narrow depth of field. Higher than F2.8 and you get more in focus, but less light. Sometimes you have to shoot wide open because it's too dark. Sometimes people move too fast to focus right with a narrow depth of field (DOF).

-ISO: I start at 1,250. Shoot the lowest ISO you can. Lower than 1,250 means less grain, but less light. Higher than 1,250 means more light, but also more grain. Color is also affected, but you usually need to shoot 400, 200 or lower to be significant, and you'll rarely shoot that. Unless you're using a Canon 1D MKIV, shooting over 2,500 ISO will be too noisy to clean up in post-production without losing detail, particulalry in wide shots.

-If you need light, balance blur against focus against grain. If you don't know which is most important for a particular shot, shoot blurry/slow with a wide DOF, then shoot sharp/fast with a narrow DOF.

-Try not to change your ISO too much and concentrate on changing shutter speed and aperture for exposure. Change the ISO only if the lighting conditions change (like between scenes) or if you really need to push the shutter speed and aperture.

-If people are dancing, you know the shutter needs to be around 1/125.

-If the scene is dark, just shoot as wide open as you can go, 2,500 ISO, 1/30 shutter speed, and try to shoot slow movements. Use wider lenses for a wider DOF. While these photos can be cool, don't expect them to be effective shots for marketing. Rely on brighter scenes for that.

-Only some of the photos you take are publishable. A lot of them will be interesting and good photos otherwise, but the stuff you should submit for reviews and advertising should fill the frame, have no blur, and look good at a small scale while clearly presenting a scene.

-Avoid shooting during dead silence. Try to shoot during singing, loud music, or dialog.

-Pace yourself and space out your shots. Unless you have a sound blimp, the sound of the camera can be distracting.

-My post-production workflow is crop, reduce noise, tone down burned out highlights, brighten details in shadows, sharpen. I never retouch the actors.

If you have questions, please feel free to E-mail me at chris@chamberimages.com.