Archive 2013 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

friscoron
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

It's crazy, but I'm pretty confident that I see the theatrical lighting much better than the person in charge of the theatrical lighting. There's holes in lights all over the stage, a significant dropoff in the four feet at the front of the stage, and a significant dropoff to the back of the stage. It drives me nuts. This is a professional theatre, albeit an older one, with performances on several stages all year round.

I'm posting a picture of a before and after of the dance in the snow forest. The backdrop is immaculate. It is a night scene, but as it's painted a dark blue to represent night, and with so little light hitting it, it just gets lost in the darkness. When I brought it into Lightroom, I wanted to do something to enhance the backdrop and to help it feel like it was in that scene in this photograph. And that's what I love about LR. You can go to the HSL tab, pick a color, and kick up the luminance and voila -- the background scene lights up.

The first shot is SOOC. It looks dark, but I was pretty happy with my working the exposure settings for these performances. This was the dress rehearsal, so I was still experimenting a bit with the lighting. By the first live performance, I wasn't adjusting the exposure more than half a stop. By the way, if you look at the stage just beyond where their feet are, you'll see the gray stage flooring turning blue. That's not stage lighting, that's the dropoff in color temperature.

Just thought I'd share. Comments welcome.

1. SOOC
http://ppcdn.500px.org/55350654/ce9e86f4e04ed17149f372dfbd16420b47cccce9/4.jpg

2. Edited Image
http://ppcdn.500px.org/55350792/7b8dd366f57f8aea7d3ce15e384c7803e4378a5b/4.jpg

Dec 19, 2013 at 12:18 PM

Andre Labonte
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

Good shot to start with given really tough light and great job with the PP!

Dec 19, 2013 at 04:54 PM

tonyfield
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

Interesting comment ... I did find similar conditions when shooting on a large stage. One day, I asked the lighting guys to boost the light by one stop to make life easier in the early days of digital. They complied --- and, when they looked at the now-bright stage, they saw a number of lighting errors ranging from colour temperature to light distribution. Since this was at the beginning of the dress rehearsal, they postponed the rehearsal for just over an hour while they made corrections.

Dec 19, 2013 at 05:07 PM

Mitchell Carter
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

In defense of theater lighting designers: they're lighting live performances, not photographs. Backgrounds that look fine to the eye might be invisible SOOC. Some of the flaws our cameras see they might not see, or they see it and don't care. I'm in awe of the good designers.

Comment on your processing: To my taste your background is now too bright (pure opinion of course), and you lost detail and color in the dancers' costumes and skin, especially in the highlights. The ballerina's red-lit hands are more obvious to me in the edited image, too. Also in my opinion, it's a well-timed shot. Thanks for sharing.

Dec 19, 2013 at 07:47 PM

MaxBerlin
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

When I saw 'nutcracker' I thought maybe you took some photos of my ex wife.

Dec 19, 2013 at 07:59 PM

friscoron
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

Thanks, Andre and Tony. That's a nice story, too, Tony!

Mitchell, as someone who's been shooting stage performances for a number of years, I totally understand that they're lighting for the performance and not for my camera. But I've also shot everything from a community center performance in a conference room to shooting for the Houston Ballet, one of the top professional dance companies in the world. So I've experienced and dealt with pretty much every kind of lighting you can have, or have not.

I also understand that the camera cannot perform the same dynamic range as the human eye. But when there is light falloff that is not intentional, or holes in their lighting scheme, that's a flaw whether someone's taking pictures or not. Like you, I'm in awe of the really good light designers. But let's not call someone a really good light designer just because they're a light designer. Unless we're both standing together looking at the lighting in person, not necessarily through the camera, we can't really effectively discuss whether it's good theatrical lighting or not. Thanks for your comments. I think this would be a fun and interesting discussion to get photographers and lighting designers together to assess various setups, both ours and theirs.

Dec 20, 2013 at 10:10 AM

danlona
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

Very nice Ron !

Dec 20, 2013 at 01:31 PM

Evan Baines
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

A nice shot and your edit is spot on.

Dec 20, 2013 at 01:36 PM

friscoron
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · One more Nutcracker -- Before and After

Thanks, Danny and Evan!

Dec 21, 2013 at 12:06 AM


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