After the very successful run of ‘Someone Somewhere Smiled’ back in February for the New Era Players company in Newbury, where I filmed the production and took some stills, I was invited back to cover this production.
An adaptation of the play by Amanda Whittington was directed by Marie Jacobs.
So to business, my setup:
I was shooting the majority of the time with my Canon 6D and my Tamron 70-300 f4-f 5.6 which is a sturdy lens (though I dream of its big brother the 70-200 f2.8) and on the Canon 600D with my Tamron 24-70 f2.8 for wides.
Being honest here, none of the wides were any good. The reason being is that my 600D is so long in the teeth now and shooting with an ISO of 800 at f4 was completely unusable no matter how many de-noise plugins I ran it through.
That left me with my 6D. Most of the time I was 135mm which meant some really decent mid frame shots. At mostly f5 and ISO 1250, the shots were really clean and didn’t get anything more than a de-noise in Lightroom.
The 6D has a virtually silent shutter setting which allowed me to be sneaky and unobtrusive to the audience when shooting (I didn’t get any complaints from the person in the row next to me anyway).
If you’re looking to get into photography for theatre, call around to your local and smaller theatres. Fringe theatre productions are often the way to go – not am dram. Stay away from am dram.