The most difficult part of stage photography is getting the opportunity. Theaters and entertainment centers are private property, even if publically owned, and the owners have the right to control who takes photographs. Owners can require people who ignore their wishes on taking photographs to leave their premises. The first step in stage photography is to find out if there are any restrictions or contacting promoters for permission to photograph the performance. One option for photographers seeking to gain experience and build their portfolio are free events in public places where access is usually less controlled.
Apart from gaining permission to photograph, there are possible difficulties due to the layout of the venue in trying to get good angles and elevations. For the best views, you need to be right in the front, blocking the view of those with prized front row positions. One solution is to crouch down while planning the next shot and then popping up to take the photograph and then crouch back down.
Even with permission a good spot is between the crowd barriers and the stage, it has the disadvantage of allowing only shots from a low angle, but at least you get a relatively uninterrupted shot of the talent.
Lens Choice
The ideal focal length range varies from venue to venue and restrictions on movement suggest a good zoom is the preferred lens. A zoom also allows tight shot of a star performer through to a wider angle shot showing the whole stage, especially for group such as choirs. A useful choice is the 70-200mm in 35mm terms or a 50-135mm on the common APS-C size sensor DSLRs. When the lighting is low, a fast, or wide maximum aperture, 50mm f1.4 lens is ideal.
One of the attractions of some genres is the unpredictability of performers and the quickly changing action on stage highlights the advantage of fast autofocus performance. This combined with setting the camera to continuous shooting mode helps capture a fast moving action sequence. Continuous shooting mode also helps in group shots where often it is difficult to get an un-posed shot without somebody blinking or otherwise not looking their best.
Lighting Conditions
This brings us to one of the contradictions, at night or indoors where the stage lighting is primarily by artificial light use the available light rather than a flash. This preserves the atmosphere the lighting director worked hard to create, and avoids annoying cast and crowd by blinding them with the bright light from the flash. However, for daylight performances some fill flash helps to soften harsh shadows on the faces of performers.
Creative use of colored light adds to the atmosphere of a performance but poses a problem for photographers, producing un-natural skin colors. The decision is to adjust the white balance for natural skin tone or keep the colorcast from a colored spotlight? The answer is to shoot in RAW format with the potential to produce copies of both cases later on in the RAW converter software.
Exposure Settings
A normal lighting set up is for spotlights on the subject in center stage with a darker background. This dramatic difference in light levels causes overexposure of the subject with the more common matrix or pattering metering modes. Using Center weighted metering adds priority to the subject in the center of the image and less to the darker background. Check the LCD display for overexposure warnings as well as the histogram and apply some exposure compensation if there are small very bright spots in the image.
The front to back distance of the stage setting is usually quite shallow so any loss of depth of field from using a wide aperture setting should not be big problem. Any slight loss is more than made up for by keeping the ISO low for good noise and better dynamic range performance in the camera.
Because this is an action situation, the shutter speed needs to be reasonably fast to prevent motion blurring of the subject’s hand gestures. For dimly lit scenes use a slower shutter speed, but wait for dramatic pause to avoid motion blur. The various technologies for reducing camera shake while handholding mean that motion blur may be more of a problem.
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