Two Shaws in a row!  My friends Sal and Miriam Brienik’s company, Standard Bear Productions is presenting Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Secret Theatre in Queens.  Yet again a Shaw play I’ve never gotten around to reading or seeing.  These photography gigs are definitely making me a more well rounded theatre person!

It’s tough when a show is technically coming in just under the wire.  This was the final dress and due to challenges beyond their control, they were short a costume or two, which meant I had to consider the shots I was taking to try to keep the anachronistic street clothes out of the shot.  I was mostly blessed with good lighting — except for the first scene in Raina’s bedroom — but even then, for the most part, I was able to keep my exposure triangle at reasonable levels.

Standard Bear also asked me to help them out with some staged photos for them a couple weeks prior to the dress for marketing and for use in the show, itself.  That was my first foray into portraiture (aside from some headshots for family) and I was reminded that it is really SO much a different beast.  I need to invest in some off-camera light gear and start practicing with it.  Shooting a show is wonderful because there is someone who has considered the lighting for you and made it pretty.  But in situations like this, it’s up to you and available light off-stage is a very different and unruly beast.  Time to start controlling it with my own light!

Luft Gangster marks my third shoot with Nylon Fusion Theatre Company and besides being excellent returning clients, their work is really top notch.

Luft Gangster is the harrowing story of survival of a young airman, shot down behind enemy lines and captured during World War II.  It’s all the more engaging knowing that the play was created from interviews the playwright did with his cousin — this is his story.

For the first time with Nylon, I actually got to come in and shoot their final dress, not an audience attended show!  It was really a necessity, because the theater they are in (the Dorothy Strelsin space at Abingdon Theatre Company) is really to small to do otherwise.  The space is so small that I shot the whole thing on my 24mm – 70mm/2.8 and much of it at the wide end.  This meant that I got to explore some wide angle and low angle shots to play with perspective a bit.

My new friends at Nylon Fusion Theatre Company (Marina/Mata Hari) brought be me back to shoot the latest iteration of their quarterly Ten Minute Play Festival This Round’s On Us with the theme Independence.  There were ten plays split into two sets, with comedian Jason Andors acting as MC.

As with Marina/Mata Hari, I was shooting with audience in the seats, lining two adjacent sides of the stage.  I snagged a chair right at the corner of the stage, which gave me pretty good angles on the action.  For eight of the ten plays, I had nice, bright lights, but one was EXTREMELY dark — amusingly, it was by the same playwright as the almost as dark Mata Hari and also starred Tatyana Kot, who had played the eponymous role.  This time, I had to crank the ISO up to 25600, was still at f2.8 and 1/80 and still had to push the exposure in Lightroom to be able to see anything.  I bet you can pick out the shot in the gallery above. Definitely a LOT of noise, but I’m glad I was able to get something for them (in the end, there were a handful of useable shots from that play).

I also did a bit of streamlining on my camera for this shoot.  I set up my custom menu to add quick access to white balance, so I can quickly set it for the room, which meant I didn’t have to adjust white balance during editing.

So thanks again to Nylon Fusion!  They do great work.  Their next play is coming in August: Luft Gangster, directed by the hardest working man in NY theatre, Austin Pendleton.  Check it out!

Oh, then there was this.  Just had to share it.

Marina and Mata Hari are a pair of one acts by playwright Don Nigro.  The one woman Marina is an appropriately poetic and tragic exploration of Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva followed by the two person Mata Hari, in which the accused spy and prostitute is visited in prison by her abusive husband on the day of her execution.

The show was presented as part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity at the Robert Moss Theater, which, if you are as old as I, you’ll remember as the Musical Theater Works Studio 1.  The shows are gorgeous, well directed by Ivette Dumeng and both of the eponymous roles are strongly performed by Tatyana Kot, with Curtis James Nielsen playing MacLeod, Mata Hari’s husband.

This shoot was a last minute affair and full of interesting challenges.  I was contacted Friday night to come in and shoot the Saturday matinee, which also happened to be their opening performance!  Usually I shoot final dress rehearsals, because there’s no paying audience and therefore the ability to move around without annoying anyone too much.  Not so this time.  I wound up in the house left corner of the last row.  I have to give massive props to Canon for their silent mode.  It was really a shoot saver here.  I’m much more confident that when I do need to shoot when the audience is present, I can do so without being disruptive.

My next challenge came in the second half, during Mata Hari.  While Marina was not brightly lit, as you can see the actress has pale skin and is wearing an ivory slip – exposure was not a problem.  I was able to keep my ISO at about 5000, aperture in the 3.5 to 5 range and the shutter speeds in the 100s to 200s.  I had to coax some details out of the shadows when processing, but nothing too challenging.  Mata Hari, on the other hand… Mata Hari takes place in her prison cell.  Dark and dank.  Costumes were black and navy (until the very end).  I was changing settings like a mad man!  I pushed the ISO up and up and pulled shutter speed down, praying that the image stabilization on my 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II would save me.  But it was still too close to the edge.  I was scared to do it, but I eventually wound up at ISO 10,000.  Again, Canon saved the day!  The ISO 10K shots on my 5D Mark III were all totally usable.  There was some speckling on the black curtain in the background, but I ran luminance noise reduction over them and they cleared right up!

Last, but not least, I recently decided to try Lightroom 5 out and this was the first major shoot I ran through its workflow.  I’ve been a Bridge + Photoshop guy for years, but I know a lot of people who adore Lr.  Gotta say, I’m hooked already.  I’ve got some definite learning to do, but the workflow is much smoother and I was able to stay in Lr for nearly everything (and had I done some more research and setup, I probably could have never left).  If only for the massive time savings I had just in flagging and rating shots, it’s worth the move.

So, in conclusion, while the gear doesn’t make the photographer, the gear can get you through some challenging scenarios!  5D Mark III silent mode and high ISO + the image stabilization of the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens made all the difference on this shoot.  Thanks, Canon!

[Update] Since my initial pass through my shots Photoshop CC was released.  I decided to run a couple of the keeper shots I had taken at low shutter speeds (1/60 or lower) through their new Shake Reduction filter just for fun.  These were shots that were a little soft, but certainly not out of focus.  Wow.  Wow does not actually begin to describe it.  They went from a little soft to tack sharp.

That’s kind of amazing.  It takes a while to render (until I get my Darth Mac Pro…), so you wouldn’t want to have to run a whole shoot through it, but for the ones that really matter, what a tool!  So Adobe, for Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC‘s Shake Reduction tool, you get kudos, too!

I was contacted by Mark Cajigao, who I’d met playing Trigorin in the production of The Seagull I shot back in February.  In this production he was playing Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in Dylan.  The show follows the poet’s life during his trips to America and his travails with drink, women and the double edged sword of celebrity.  I must admit, I don’t know much about Thomas’s life, though I knew that he was a habitué of the White Horse Tavern.  This tragic, though often humorous look at his final years was a good evening of theatre.

The show was performed at Voorhees Theater, which is on the campus of CUNY City Tech.  This space is a hidden jewel normally used as a teaching space for their Entertainment Technology department.  It’s a well appointed, if small space, but with top notch technical appointments.

The shoot went well.  I was given the second row to work in and, given the small space and intimacy, there was no problem getting some lovely shots of the actors.  I mostly shot with the 70-200 with some fill in from the 24-70 to get some wider shots of the set and some of the more spread out group scenes.  I kept the ISO up at 6400 and was mostly covered, except for a couple of scenes that were very softly lit.

I got to return to the Pearl Theatre Company and shoot their latest show: This Side of Neverland.  What a different space!  From the sprawling, wide-open expanse of Henry IV, Part 1, to a constrained homage to the turn of the century theaters that might have portrayed J.M. Barrie’s plays in England.  Having only known Barrie as most people probably do, from Peter Pan, it was interesting to see two of his one-act plays that were, frankly, probably a bit subversive in his day!  Rosalind explores women and aging, especially women of the stage and how they must stay young to land roles and the choices they make of diet and fashion over comfort; career over family.  The Twelve Pound Look takes a look at women’s independence and the false security of success and ambition.  Both dealt with their themes with easy humor delivered with an occasional sting.

The shoot was uneventful.  The lighting was the brightest I’ve dealt with for a while, so I was able to shoot at nice high apertures and at a relatively low ISO.  My one challenge was that, especially in the first piece, the costumes tended to blend in with the set and due to the shallow stage, there wasn’t much light coming from behind to separate the actors from the background.  It was 100% evocative of a music hall, but for taking photos it made things a little flat.

This was an interesting shoot.  My friend DarrylLee (SM from Zombies – gallery coming soon) is the stage manager for the show and I saw the marketing material come by on her Facebook. It looked like it might be interesting to shoot, so I reached out to DarrylLee to ask if I could come by.  She said they had “some photographers” coming by for their final dress and I was welcome to join.  Little did I know that “some” meant SEVEN other photographers.  We outnumbered the cast!

Despite the fact that it felt like we were waiting for Lindsay Lohan to show up, it is a very strong show and the production values were well realized.  Creative set and costumes, good fights (a personal barometer of theatrical worth) and a very good script.

One final interesting note:  The producers created a drop box where the photographers could put our wares, so I got to take a peek at my fellow shooters’ work.  It’s rare I see the “dump” of images from another photographer — usually it’s a few shots on a blog, one or two photos on a review or in Facebook.  It was interesting to see how others chose to shoot, what they chose to show and how they chose to edit.  I think I fared well amidst the crowd!

This was an incredibly fun shoot.  I was actually working on this show as the understudy to Falstaff (played by the wonderful Dan Daily) and knowing a show that well certainly gives you an edge for knowing the important moments and the best angles.  The Pearl is a fantastic company and this was one of their first shows in their new space (the old Signature Theater) and certainly the first that made TOTAL use of the stage area, which was giant.  Certainly H4P1 is a show that can use all that space and it was used to the fullest.

This was also a great opportunity for me as a photographer, as my work was featured in many of the reviews for the show.

This show was produced and performed by some friends I’d worked with before, but hadn’t seen in ages, so wonderful to see them all again.  It was also performed in one of my favorite off-off-Broadway spaces, the Women’s Interart Center, home to my friends at Blessed Unrest, but also where I directed Stormy Weather: Tornado/Avalanche.

Shooting in these small spaces is always a challenge.  There’s not enough house to be able to move freely without being in everyone’s way — there was creative team in every row!  I pretty much shot from one spot, but occasionally scenes unfolded favoring the other side of the stage, so I tried to head to the other side of the house around the back (oddly enough, essentially backstage) only to find that the angles there were worse!  Of course that’s when the eponymous prop made his entrance and I wasn’t able to get a good shot (pardon the pun) of him.

Sometimes the Seagull wins…