Wednesday 10 April 2013

Romeo vs Juliette - Part One

Those of you who regularly visit my Facebook Page, Eric Mahannah Photography (go once, go twice, tell your friends and don't forget to 'Like' it) have probably already seen the pictures you're about to see.  I've been posting them there over the last few days.  However, I didn't want this page to be neglected, and I also felt it was time to tell some of the story behind these photos.  These photos were taken by yours truly on April 4th at the show Romeo vs Juliette.  Put on by the wonderful group, Choeur Vives Voix.  Romeo vs Juliette is kind of a different take on the famous play written by William Shakespeare.  This is the second year in a row that I had the fortune of being able to work with these great people and I had a wonderful time.  It's always a bit of a challenge to shoot these shows and this year was no different.  Low light means you have to use a high ISO and a wide aperture, much like I mentioned in the previous post about the pictures I took at the hockey game.  The lighting was even more severe at the show.  Once again, I shot everything in AV mode with the ISO at 1600 and every photo I took was at f/2.8.  No other options available.  To shoot at any other aperture would have resulted in slower shutter speeds and would have resulted in some very blurry images.  It's perhaps just my opinion, but I thought that the lighting was even darker this year than it was for last years show.  In order to appearance, the speeds that ended up being used were 1/320sec, 1/250sec, 1/400 sec, 1/500sec and 1/250sec.  My early photos were suffering from a bad case of the Blurries so I decided after the second scene that instead of trying to pick and choose, I had seen the play before shooting and knew when the most important scenes were going to happen, I would shoot as much as possible.  My trigger finger got a good work out as I ended up with almost 1800 photographs on my camera when the final curtain came down to bring and end to the show.  Yes, that is excessive.  I jokingly called this my Quantity over Quality strategy.  I then had the fun task of trying to edit down that large number to a total that fits comfortably onto t a CD.  In this case, the magic number was 200 photographs. That meant that almost 1600 photographs would have to go.  The first round of editing went rather quickly.  The photos that had been infected with a bad case of the Blurries were quickly brushed aside, never to be seen again.  Some with a small case of blurring around the hands were kept because I kind of liked the effect of motion that the blurring gave to the photos.  Afterwards, I then tried to cut down on multiple photos from the same scene.  I wanted to have at least one photo from every scene in the show rather than 20 from one 5 minute period and nothing from any of the others.  After a couple of days, the cutting was done and I had enough photos to fill the CD.  However, before I even got to that stage, something happened that almost resulted in my having no photos of the show here for me to show you at all.  Something that caused my heart to skip a few beats.  Something that you'll have to come back here later to read when I publish Part 2 in a few days!  Always keep your audience wanting more...








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