Intro
A few weeks ago I got the chance to shoot a musical production…. It has been a while since I shot a concert or stage production so I jumped at the chance to shoot something different. I went along on the Friday night to watch the show and get a few ideas. Saturday I asked istefan™ if he wanted to be the second shooter so we could cover more angles.
How what and why…
I have shot a lot of events and weddings over the years and thought I would approach this shoot with a similar set up. I packed
*Sony Alpha 900 with vertical grip
*Sony Alpha 700 with vertical grip
*Sony 70-200mm 2.8 SSM G
*Sony 50mm 1.4
*Zeiss 24-70mm 2.8 SSM
*Zeiss 85mm 1.4
*Sigma 14mm 3.5
*Monopod, lots of batteries and CF cards
Obviously no flash was allowed and I didn’t want to use one any way, as that would distract from the available light. My plan was to shoot RAW, A mode, ISO 1600 with centre weighted metering. After about the first 5 minutes I realised the camera meter just couldn’t deal with the complicated lighting situations properly. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted. Either the backgrounds were to bright, or the highlights were burnt out or the whole image looked under exposed. To solve this I switched to RAW, M mode, ISO 800, 1/125th exposure time, spot metering and adjusted my f/ stop to match the lighting and highlight.
By the end of the night I had about 700 images (shot in 2 and a half hours), and istefan™ had about the same. As I shot a lot of the dance sequences at 5 frames per second there were a lot of very similar images, I edited this down to 200 about images. Once I had my final selection the post production was very quick. I simply have to load my selection into lightroom and go through doing minor corrections e.g. crop, sharpen, noise reduction and saturation etc.
Very interesting how you’ve solved the light situation.
Your gear seems to be enviable
Krätzsche
I wonder what lenses you had on which camera for your musical shoot?
I swapped the lenses around a bit, but mostly had the 70-200 on the A900