Techniques for theater photography? White balance, etc.

I am shooting a theater production in a few days and was curious as to what

experienced theater shooters do.

White balance? Lens focal length? Exposure mode? Shutter? Aperture?

I will be using Nikon d-200 and d-70. I have a range of lenses from sigma super

wide 10-20 f4-5.6, nikkor 28-70 2.8, nikkor 80-200 2.8, nikkor 60mm. micro 2.8

and even fisheye tamron 10-17.

The production (IT IS A MUSICAL) will be using a lot of neon lights I have been

informed (probably for the backgrounds) but I imagine most theater productions

use incandescent hot lights for the lighting of the actors. Thanks for your input.

There are enough similarlities between theater and concert photography that you should look <a href="http://www.photo.net/learn/concerts/mirarchi/concer_i">in these photo.net pages</a>. It was written for film, but is still useful.

Hector gave you a good link, but I'll pass one one bit of advice when shooting digital. Shoot in RAW mode and set your white balance to tungsten. Unless you know there will be weird lighting, if it's typical theater lighting with colored gels, use the tungsten setting. The tunsten setting compensates for the white color of the ungelled light so with the gels the resulting image will be close to what the lighting designer created.

 

By shooting RAW you can always color correct after the fact, and by shooting with the WB in tungsten you'll be really close. After shooting a thousand images for a typical performance, I'll extract the embedded JPG's in the RAW files and use those as proofs. I only will print and deliver a small subset of images from the entire shoot, and for those few I'll 'develop' the RAW file and tweak the WB, if necessary.

Oh, BTW, I realised you posted this in the lighting forum. I hope you are not planning on using flash... big no-no. Crank the ISO up as high as you're comfortable with your camera. I've found that with dance, I need ISO3200 or ISO6400 and I'll get a shutter of 1/125 - 1/250 and an aperture of f/2.8. YMMV.

What Dave said, is what to do, if you can. My theatre client is on a major budget, so I do a walk through with them, staging particular moments and making several photos of critical moments in the play. This way I can meter, compose and time the moments quite carefully, and burn a CD of jpgs for them on the spot. I still shoot NEFs plus Fine JPGs, because that's the way I am... t<div></div>

Use a tripod. Don't use the super wides. That 28-70 is your friend as is the D200... t

A fast prime in the other camera body could be nice. Even one stop more really makes a difference when you're shooting dancers in changing light.

Thanks for your input gentlemen. I was planning on shooting raw and using the 28-70 as my main lens. This will be a dress rehearsal with , most likely, no stopping during the action so I will not have the luxury of setting up scenes like you do Tom. I was planning on leaving one body on tripod in the front of the theater with remote and then wandering from side to side with a second body hand held taking "candids" and using the remote to fire the stage front body when a group shot was called for. How does that technique sound?

Also, i usually shoot corporate, food and travel for which I always shoot at iso 100 but I guess I will shoot at a much higher ISO to get the shutter speed I need. For this purpose (theater company web site promo and brochures) I assume noise will not be a problem.

Finally, what metering do you suggest? Center, spot, matrix? And, shooting at 2.8 will be ok as long as I focus on main actor? F5.6 or F8 not necessary? I will check out the review you sent me also Hector.

If you are doing this for their commercial purposes, impose some professional requirements on them and ask for a half hour to shoot key moments in the production as per my supplied image above. It takes little time and can produce much more exciting and compelling imagery. It's in <i>their</i> best interests to give you the time to make a few good images in this way. Otherwise you will be settling for less than the best you could get with only a little more effort from your client... t<div></div>

I have a son who is a professional actor in musical theater.

Theater lighting will vary too much for automatic anything. I use

Manual fstop, manual shutter speed, and manual white balance.

ESPECIALLY manual white balance. I balance for the main spot light and leave it that way for the entire show. Similar to the guy who suggested setting your camera to tungsten. I shoot jpgs because raw is too slow on my camera. YMMV.

The good news is that each scene has relatively predictable light.

Put the camera in manual, pick a shutter speed that will stop the action. Select an ISO - probably 1600, and adjust your fstop as needed. I pop a frame, look at the screen - if there are no blinking highlights you will be pretty close. Exposure bracketing is a good idea also. Sometimes I'll autobracket and just pop 3 quick exposures of everything.

 

If this is a professional gig I echo the guy that told you to demand 30 minutes for shooting. Some of the best shots are when you can get up on the stage and in the middle of the action, funky angles, etc.

 

Check out http://picasaweb.google.com/jimcoffey62 for This is a set of shots I did for free for my church. I uploaded everything with zero post processing (the good, the bad, and the UGLY). You'll also notice some places where I used flash to get the kids coming down the aisle and forgot to reset the white balance (so the little darlings come out a bit blue) - cest la vie.

 

Don't forget to get some behind the scenes shots if you can. They can help tell the story.

When you all are recommending tungsten wb setting I assume you mean incandescent as there is no exact setting on a D-200 for tungsten while there is a setting for incandescent. Correct?

correct. <p>It doesn't seem to be purely a color temp issue, but "Incandescent" or "tungsten" is a good place to start. Next would be using a good WB target to make a custom WB in their most neutral light.<p> Shooting raw files (NEFs) will save you from miscalculations or spontaneous leaps in color temp, i.e. Jim's jpgs made with flash in a camera set to "incandescent" (as mentioned above). <p>Lightroom makes correcting and converting a ton of NEFs to jpgs a breeze...way easier than "fixing" even a small number of mis-matched jpgs... t

I was not planning on shooting nef/jpeg as I don't have too much experience with shooting both together although I have done it once or twice. When I have a gig, I like to shoot what I know.

Also, the director tells me I can shoot with flash as it is a dress rehearsal. I am thinking as it is a musical and there will be quite a bit of dancing that I may shoot a few dance scenes with flash set to slow shutter which should capture some movement while still freezing focus on faces/bodies. How does that sound to you?

I'm surprised that the director is allowing flash, even if it is a dress rehearsal. Flash can be distracting and disorienting, especially when there is dancing on stage. But I would caution you against flash for another reason. I think you'll have difficulty in balancing the color temperature of the flash with the color of the stage lighting, even with a CTO gel on the flash (and the stage neon makes for a third variable). And if you drag the shutter you may get an artistic effect, but IMO they look smeary and amateurish. Lastly, you'll be risking red-eye if an actor happens to be looking at the flash at the moment of exposure. Do you really want to retouch that many photos for red-eye?

 

When I shoot stage productions, I set my camera to ISO1600 or ISO3200 (now 6400), put the camera in Tv mode with the shutter at 1/200 and meter in evaluative mode. If it's a spot light scene with a lot of dark background I'll quickly dial in -1 to -2 exposure compensation and check the histogram to make sure the camera isn't blowing the highlights (like faces). I'll use either fast primes (f/1.8 or f/2) or fast zooms (f/2.8). In the dim lighting the camera may have problems focusing with a slower lens, and the camera will use the extra stop.

 

I suggest you keep the flash in the camera bag and use the available light of the stage. Stage photography may look easy but it isn't. Don't complicate things by adding extra variables. Use the D200 at the highest ISO you think it's capable of and the fastest lenses you have (or can get). And don't judge the ISO performance of the D200 by what you see on your computer monitor. Make an 8x10 print and judge that. I think you'll find that it'll do quite well at ISO1600.

thanks dave. I did consider the red eye factor and perhaps I will only use flash for a few shots just to see what it does for the future. I also lost the gels that came with flash but I could use similar color (blue or orange?) from my sample roscoe gels.

I usually shoot product or corpo in which case I always shoot at iso100 but in this case i will have to pump it up to at least 800 or higher as you suggest. my fastest lenses are 2.8 but not wanting to lose the actors other than the one focused on, don't you think I should shoot at f4 or f5.6?

Hello

 

I was in the same situation of having to photograph a theatre performance. I followed (tried to anyway) the advice given here but all of my images still turned out extremely dark

 

- Canon Digital Rebel

- No Flash

- ISO1600

- TV Mode with shutter at 1/125

 

I was shooting from the front row of the theatre.

 

Any thoughts on what I missed?

 

Thanks

J

I shoot quite a bit of theatre - another problem other than those already mentioned with flash is it destroys the work of the designers. They designed the sets & costumes with the lighting in mind; the flash blows that away.

 

I generally shoot with f 2.8 lenses & auto ISO, limiting the top ISO for a D200 at 800 & the D300 at 1600. The trick is to have watched a couple of rehearsals so you know where the blocking favors long exposures. Most of my rehearsal or production images are made at 1/15 or 1/30 - although VR may help your end, if the actors are moving it won't work. You need to watch for the pauses in the action that let you use slow shutter speeds. If you need to do large groups, try talking the director into a photocall where you can stop the action. This also helps with depth of field. I usually shoot photocalls at f 5.6, with shutter speeds as long as 1 second.

 

Check http://www.lakeshoreimages.com/theatrepix.html for some of the shows I have shot at SUNY Oswego. The last one (Cabaret) was shot with a D300, they work backwards through a series of Nikon DSLRs, Point & Shoots, and film...

<p>I note that when using a high ISO, that the noise gets worse ... inherent in digital photography, as was the grain in the 35mm days! But when shooting in RAW, does the noise get reduced, if not what would you suggest to reduce the noise with such a high ISO?</p>