(continued)

When shooting digital it is easy to shoot indoors and color correct your images in post and preserve the look of the scene. I have found that with careful metering you can achieve good photos without much work in post as well. The compromise when shooting without a flash is that you probably need a tripod as you will be shooting at slow shutter speeds, and you may have to sacrifice depth of field as you shoot at wider apertures.

To be effective you need to have fast lenses and a good camera and you need to have good training. Sometimes you only get a couple seconds to compose a shot, think about how to meter it and start to shoot it. I make it a point to think about each shot I take, even if I don't get a lot of time.

I always shoot with only the ambient light (no flash). This is critical for achieving shots that truly represent what is on stage. If you PR people don't have a background in shooting for theatre or they are trained as journalists that may be why they like the flash. It also could be if they are shooting film.

Most film is color balanced for daylight so shooting in the theatre under "tungsten" light causes a yellow cast on the image. They make tungsten color balanced film and you can also use color correction filters to avoid this but as film photography seems to be a dying art people are less familiar with this and the products are becoming more expensive and hard to come by.

On the other hand these photographers my just feel like shooting indoors without a flash is outside their comfort zone. They may have just been trained to use a flash indoors.

Hi!

I had a question that's not really pertaining to tech theatre. When you photograph theatrical scenes, do you use a flash, or do you let the stage lighting do its own work?
When the P.R. people come into do the photo shoot, they use flash on their camera and it seems to wash out any effects that I do with my light plot - especially on a cyc background.