The Athenian Players Theatre

What fun we had last night!!! We were asked by The Athenian Players Theatre and the Berean Community Players to come to their dress rehearsal of Li'l Abner, which they are performing at the absolutely beautiful Stuart's Opera House, and grab a few photos that they could use for promotion in the local media and on their website. They put on these shows with very little money and a whole lot of hard work and love, and it truly was an honor for Heather and I to be able to take photos for these wonderful, community oriented people. They even said we could bring our kids along to watch the show while we did the shoot and all 3 girls ended up just loving it...which if they can keep 12 yr. old twin girls and an 8 yr. old girl interested for 2 hours, that goes a long way in showing what kind of product these people are putting out there!

We had never taken photos in Stuart's before or for a musical/play for that matter, so we were pretty excited going into this new territory. We figured we would be dealing with rough lighting conditions...very dim and changing...so our plan was basically the same one we use for weddings, Heather would use the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 and work up a little closer and get wide-angles, and I would use the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 and work farther away and also grab some head shots. We also figured we would probably never go smaller than f/4 so that we could keep our ISO's lower. Heather was using the Nikon D80 and I was using the D200, both set at Auto ISO with the max ISO at 800 and minimum shutter at 1/80. We also were using Aperture Priority and shooting Raw + basic jpeg.

Turns out, the lighting was much better than we thought! There were a few scenes where the lights would dim for a moody sequence and it would get a little tricky...the ISO's hitting 800...but most of the time we could stay in the 200 - 400 range very easily. The thing we DIDN'T anticipate was the speed and movement of the actors! Wow, it was like shooting a football game or a motocross!!! We ended up taking probably 600 shots in the 2 hour period we were there and I would say 50 of them have considerable motion blur and another 50 have "manageable in Photoshop" blur.

So what did we learn and what will we do different! First is we WILL stay in Auto ISO. Though the lighting was always relatively good, it did change as the actors walked around the stage, from side to side, and if you were running in complete manual mode you would be missing a lot of action trying to adjust exposure on the fly. Second we would probably stay in Aperture Priority, but up the minimum speed to 1/100 or maybe even 1/125. One hundred blurry shots out of 600 is just unacceptable! But other than that, we felt pretty good about the way the shoot went. We ended up with some really, really fun stuff that we can be proud of...and no one has to see the blurry stuff we're un-proud of - LOL

So thanks again to all of the folks involved with the production of Li'l Abner...Stuart's, all of the actors, directors, producers, lighting and sound people and especially Jim Parsons for the initial email inviting us to participate. We had just a wonderful, wonderful time and just hope you keep us in mind for all your upcoming projects. We would love to be a small part of it...

Jeffrey Morris