Theater!

My daughter is an actor (that's not her in the above photo which is from Center Stage Theater's 2008 production of "The Suessification of Romeo and Juliet"). She performs in local community theaters in whatever age appropriate roles she can get (she started at age 8 and is now 12). Currently she is associated with Center Stage Theater in Deer Park, Texas. Since I routinely showed up to photograph all of Emma's performances the directors of the theater asked me to be their "official photographer". Sometimes I photograph at rehearsals and sometimes during live performances. Either way there are special challenges involving lighting and composition. The most difficult challenge in theatrical photography is dealing with the lighting (especially in a live performance). In my experience the lighting is generally low key which is pretty much the main reason I upgraded from the Canon XTi to the Canon 40D (advertising promised considerable improvement in graininess over the XTi at any given ISO). I would like to be able to use my 50mm f/1.4 lens for this job but in practice it is usually just too long (especially on a crop camera) for shooting in the tight quarters of small community theater's. My solution was to purchase the Canon 18-55mm f/2.8 IS lens and so far this lens on the 40D has worked out well. Since I shoot a lot of theatrical photographs I plan on occasionally posting a few here. I hope you enjoy them.



The above photograph is from Center Stage Theater's 2008 production of "Ives a la Carte".