While The Lights Were Out

Regular readers will know I’m the resident photographer for the Chorlton Players. You can see some examples of my work here (they're not all mine). I turn up to all the dress rehearsals (or at least, as many as work allows – and I do try to manage my calendar to avoid disappointment) and spend the evening between 7.30pm and ~11pm snapping happily away from the floor of the hall, walking to and fro to get various angles on the stage, sometimes taking extreme close-ups, sometimes shots of the whole stage, sometimes with flash, sometimes without.

Generally I prefer not to use the flash. The colours are more natural and there’s no red-eye problem. But many of the plays involve lots of movement and subdued lighting, which leads to a high percentage of wasted shots, blurred from the actors’ sudden movements or out of focus because the dim light combined with use of maximum zoom has defeated the autofocus. The “waste” isn’t a problem of course: it’s a digital camera. It just means time wasted taking shots I can’t use, plus more time lost filtering through the pics back at home, throwing them in the recycle bin.

So usually I have to resort to flash. It’s a swings-and-roundabouts situation though; the close-ups inevitably mean more time spent fixing the red eyes once I get home.

For once last night’s dress, for the latest production While The Lights Were Out, had almost no problems with sudden movement. A traditional whodunit farce-type-thing in the style of Agatha Christie (although actually written by Jack Sharkey), the play has a single set where all three acts take place. This meant I ran the risk of the pics being a little samey and meant I had to keep changing my viewpoint to maximise the variety. The play involves a lot of standing around while the cast engage in vast amounts of exposition about what happened and why. The result was that although I took my usual 300+ shots in total, there were far fewer that needed throwing away (after the first pass I was left with 280 usable shots) and many more that fell into the “best” category (after the second pass I had 144 in my “Best” folder compared to an average of 50 for other productions).

After doing all the post-processing of the pics and then assembling some of the very best shots into my traditional six A4 posters for the hall doors, it was 2:15am. Time to grab 4 hours sleep before jumping the 7:15 to Euston in the morning.