Chokehold – from the columbinus set




It’s always a treat to shoot for Stray Cat Theatre and their invariably talented casts, but this shoot in particular was difficult.

Stage lighting is rarely bright enough for photography, so I need to work with their lighting director to rebalance things just a little bit – the human eye has a much, much greater dynamic range than a digital camera, or even film.

Add this to the multiple temperatures of “white” resulting from different lighting instruments. An incandescent bulb is much more “orange” than a halogen or LED-based instrument, so things look a little strange straight out of the camera.

In trying to keep their lighting moods as close to the actual performance as possible, I typically have the actors “freeze” and hold a position while I get the shot so I don’t have to get the lighting much hotter than “normal” for the performance. In some cases, I allow a bit of blur to suggest the action being taken.

In a “normal” production session, we’ll start right after a performance and run the scenes backwards, so the stage ends up being set for the next performance. And since we’re not shooting during a performance, we don’t have an audience full of people annoyed at the photographer… and I’m not fumbling with a “blimp” to silence the camera, either.

The complete set of columbinus images can be seen in my columbinus photoset on Flickr.