I’ve long been a fan of The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show. I had only once seen it live on stage until this summer, when virtually by accident I had the chance to see it on Saltspring* Island. Two weeks later I was back on Saltspring, and this time to photograph af full performance of the show at Fulford Hall.
I started by going downstairs to the dressing room, where I photographed the actors getting ready for the show. Even though the performance itself is the main thing, I always enjoy a little behind the scene stuff. After shooting a while in the dressing room I went back up to the main hall and got myself ready for the performance.
Shooting a live performance like this is quite a challenge. The light is constantly changing, and often is quite low. I used my 70-200 lens almost the whole time, with the aperture wide open at f/2.8, and sometimes had to crank the ISO up to 4000 and slow the shutter down to 1/60. To make matters even trickier, I forgot to bring an extra memory card (that better not happen again) – which was bad because intermission doesn’t come at the 50% mark, but rather at the 70% mark! That meant I had to shoot some of the images of the first half as JPG instead of RAW, which conjured up some interesting Iceandic swearwords during post processing. At the intermission I emptied my memory card on to my laptop, which allowed me to shoot RAW and no JPG during the second half.
Another challenge during a live stage performance is where I can shoot. I didn’t move around a lot – had I done that, I would have been too intrusive to both he audience and the cast. It helped having seen the show two weeks earlier, even though I hadn’t watched it as a photographer preparing for a shoot would have.
Oh, and one more thing. I thought that my shutter wouldn’t be too loud, as this is a loud show – or so I thought. In general it is loud. But there are quiet parts, and those parts I wanted to photograph too. And every time I fired of a shot, I made sure I didn’t look around too much. Instead I just imagined the angry stares I was getting for being so loud.
But all in all I think it went quite well. It would certainly have been better to shoot during rehearsal, thus having the freedom to walk around the auditorum (and even the stage itself), plus using different lenses, such as as a 24-70, but at least this gave me a whiff of theatrical photography, something which interests me.
And since you’ve so diligentely read the post I think I ought to give you a peek at the end result.
[Edit (August 30th, 2010): For those interested, prints from the performance can now be bought through SmugMug.]
