Shooting Onstage Performances
Taking effective photos during plays, music recitals, ballets, and other performances is difficult even for professional photographers. What makes theater lighting tricky is that the bright main light on your child star is often right in the same frame with a subdued or even darkened background. If you use automatic mode under these conditions, then the camera calibrates the exposure, brightening up the image enough to display the dominant dim background. As a result, the spotlighted performers turn into white-hot, irradiated ghost children.
The good news is, most digital cameras let you easily adjust for uneven lighting. And once you master features like spot metering and exposure compensation, you can use these techniques to shoot in any theatrical situation, even Carnegie Hall. (Your kid is going to perform at Carnegie Hall, isn’t she?)
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Note: Your built-in flash is useless in a darkened theater (unless you climb right up on stage beside the actors, which management generally frowns upon). The typical range for a digital camera’s flash is about ten feet, after which it’s about as useful as an icemaker in Alaska. So turn your flash off at theater performances: It’s annoying to the rest of the audience, it’s worthless, and it’s usually forbidden.
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1. Lighting up the stage with spot metering
If your camera has a spot-meter mode, your budding performers in the spotlight have a fighting chance against a dark backdrop. As noted earlier in this chapter, your camera generally gauges the brightness of the scene by averaging the light across the entire framea recipe for disaster when you’re shooting the stage.
Spot metering, however, lets you designate a particular spot in the scene whose brightness you want the camera to measure. (You indicate what spot that is by positioning a frame marker that appears in the center of the frame.) Point the spot-metering area at the brightly lit performers; try to position it on faces rather than costumes, especially if the latter are very dark, light, or glittery. The camera then sets the exposure on your subjects instead of on the vast expanse of the dimly lit set.
2. Adjusting for poor lighting with exposure compensation
Not all cameras have a spot-metering mode. But even basic cameras generally offer some kind of exposure compensation, an overall brightness control. For theater situations, try lowering the exposure to1 or1.5, for example. The objective is to darken the entire scene. The background will be too dark, of course, but at least the actors won’t be blown out.
