Panto!

Dress rehearsal for the Chorlton Players panto tonight and as usual I was there to take the production photographs.

I quite enjoy doing this. Getting a preview of the show is great fun, there's a sense of anticipation before the opening night and a great deal of satisfaction in grabbing the really good shots from the performance. Making sure you get a few good shots is a challenge, when the actors are almost constantly moving, the lighting is changing from one scene to the next and, having not been involved in rehearsals, I'm not aware of when the key scenes are coming up, so I have to be constantly on my toes and aware of the action. It's all too easy to slip into the role of "audience" - sitting there being entertained and letting the scenes unfold in front of me until I suddenly realise I've missed photographing a crucial moment. Maintaining concentration becomes ever harder as the evening wears on, since dress rehearsals rarely finish before 11pm.

So I was particularly pleased to capture this one - the moment where the principal boy, having examined his map, declares that everyone has to go "that way." In every production I generally manage 2 or 3 really good shots like this, out of the hundreds I take during the evening (I set a new personal record with this year's panto, taking 435 shots tonight over the course of 3 hours).

But the work doesn't stop when the rehearsal is over. I only have the raw material at that point. On my return home, I copy the contents of my memory card over to the PC (which takes a tad over 5 minutes!) and then perform a first pass selection, removing the motion blurred ones, the really bad facial expressions, and the ones where the actors have moved out of shot or blinked at the last second. On average this gets rid of 25% or so, leaving me with around 300 that are reasonably focussed (given that the primary display format will be on the web) and well framed.

I then do a second pass to select the "best" shots and copy these into a separate folder. These are the ones destined for the website. Normally I've ended up with 50 or so in here, but the last two productions have given me over 100 good shots. Am I getting better or discriminating less?

With the best shots selected, I open them all up and fix any red eye problems. I try to avoid using flash when I can. With a fast lens and the camera set to the equivalent of 400ASA film speed I don't usually need it, but for action scenes flash is essential or I'd end up with a blurry mess, and I also find it helps the colour balance on those scenes that are lit with a preponderence of red (scary scenes in the monster's hideaway, or the guts of the fox, or when the lighting crew dim the floods during a song). For these shots, unless the actors are looking across camera, there's always some degree of red eye.

Finally, I make the posters that hang on the doors of the theatre. I call them posters even though I only print them on A4 sheets. I normally do 6, with somewhere between 4 and 8 shots on the page depending on the content. I arrange them in various ways, some at 15° angles, and print them all off.

Then before going to bed (which I usually manage by about 2.30am) I kick off the FTP transfer of the best photos to the online gallery on the Chorlton Players website so that it will be finished by the time I wake up, and I can create the entry for that particular show.