Picture Taking for Lighting.

[Jimbo The Wiz]

Hi all,

 

I am looking for some advice on taking pictures of lighting. I have taken quite a few pictures of my work and other events and they never seem to come out well. sometimes they loose the beams and colours don't look perfect. I was wondering if anyone has any advice on taking photos that make lighting look better or look more like what the eye sees. also I am looking to get a sub £200 digital camera and was wondering what other people have and which they would recommend. I need it to odviously work well in low light conditions, have as little shutter lag as possible, size isn't such an issue but I wouldn't mind a fair amount of functionality. any help would be great. ;)

[colinmonk]

Simplist bit of advice, dont use flash!

[Paul J Need]

Hi

 

http://www.pauljneed.co.uk/nitin02.jpg

Due to the nature of high contrast between black, and the brightest part of the image, you need to find a camera which has centre weighted or a spot metering. Ideally you want to expose the shot to the actor/singers face rather than get a average metre reading for the entire frame.

 

If you are more interested in the lighting rather than the subject i.e. Actor/performer, get a reading of the the light hitting the stage, or of the smoke (if used)

 

Typically, the shots I take are often at f2.8 (maximum aperture), 1,250 - 3,200 ASA (Very fast film speed) and often no more than 1/125th of a second - so a box standard insta-matic will not achieve this. Although I have had a few successes with cheaper cameras, this has been more to do with luck rather than skill. Centre-weighted or spot metering is the key. Average daylight film is 100 ASA so five times less sensitive than when shooting at 1250ASA

 

Also, you need to bare in mind the film you buy from boots etc is daylight exposure film. So, you either need to use a filter to convert this to tungsten, or use tungsten balanced film or ask the people who do your prints to print and adjust to tungsten. If using digital, simply select the colour balance to tungsten ;)

 

If you need any more help PM me or e-mail from either of the www sites on my profile.

 

http://www.pauljneed.co.uk/nitin01.jpg

 

Paul

[paulears]

most manufacturers don't give much info on low light image quality. Mine takes great pics, but at a fairly slow shutter speed - probably equivalent to 1/25th on an slr. great quality if you don't have fast moving subjects

 

typical stage levels give good colour and saturation levels.

 

mine's a fuji S3500 for info

[Just Some Bloke]

Just to agree with everyone else, a good camera makes all the difference. However, if you can't afford more than £200 and want to buy digital here's a short list of things to look for:

 

1) Ability to disable the flash (ESSENTIAL!!)

2) Ability to set your own shutter speed (otherwise it will always try to make evrything the same brightness. If you intend the scene to look dark you'll have to overide the camera)

3) Good zoom (not including digital zoom which will just give you more obvious pixels)

4) Doesn't beep too loudly when in focus etc., as this can be annoying when people are trying to watch a play!

5) Make sure you budget for getting a bigger memory card than they include in the price, or you'll run out of space before the end of Act 1!

 

HTH

[Pete McCrea]

I use the Fuji Finepix S5000 which cost about £260 when new. This produces good results know I know how to 'work it'. Most of the cheaper digital cameras I've used have always blurred the shots. But with the manual settings to allow full control it actually works nicely. For full on photography, maybe consider a tripod.

[Ellis]

If you are using old fashioned colour print film, when getting it processed, ask them to print it without correcting the colour balance!

[vinny baby]

I take all pictures at most of my gigs, (for CV and stuff) I only use a cheap digital camera, that I bought from tescos (of all places) and it cost me £70.

 

The camera takes perfect shots in low light, as well as in bright light. The camera also has a nice function called a strobe shutter, which pulses the shutter so it takes very fast shots, and picks fast moving subjects perfect.

 

You can get away with using a simple budget camera, or if ya looking for something a little better then get something professional.

 

but most of the time I can cope with my £70 tesco camera ;)

 

The biggest thing for me is video!! I sometimes record my work on a video camera, this is something I havent mangaged to get a perfect result from, the focus I have got right as it is ok recording strobe effects on stage, but I get quite a lot of bleeding from Red, and UV colours.

 

ne body know any tricks for this?

 

this is a pic I took with my £70 digital camera

 

show pic 1

[Stu]

I can't really add anything to the already great advice offerred except to say if your going to take photos of Stage Lighting and end up using a slow shutter speed make sure you have a good tripod, or something flat and steady to rest the camera on.

 

Otherwise you'll have blurry pictures of your lighting!

 

HTH,

Stu

[david.elsbury]

The biggest thing for me is video!! I sometimes record my work on a video camera, this is something I havent mangaged to get a perfect result from, the focus I have got right as it is ok recording strobe effects on stage, but I get quite a lot of bleeding from Red, and UV colours.

 

ne body know any tricks for this?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

You need to be using a camera that you can take over the controls manually- i.e. focus and exposure and colour temperature if possible. I used to use (and still occasionally do) use a M40 camera from Panasonic- set it to manual focus, so that when you fade the focus doesn't shift and "hunt", manual exposure (usually closed it right down as low as it could go) so that the brightest part of the picture is properly exposed, and colour temperature so that the whites look white on video.

One thing to remember is that, although you are *not* neccesarialy lighting for video, if you want to get good results keep the wash at an even level across the stage, so that the picture doesn't bloom.

Speaking of which, reds are pretty bad on video... example, the cyc at my old college... so I ran the reds at about 70% and the yellow at roughly the same so that the colours looked OK on the video- it also stops it being so overpowering on stage.

AFAIK, UV is not ideal for recording under, because it's a different wavelength of light. Again, manual exposure, focus and colour temp- and possibly having a closer shot than a full-stage camera. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that, however.

 

Anyway hope this helps somehow ;)

David

[gaspipe58]

Photography - Have you thought of black & white? Can be very effective. Having said that it's expensive if you have to use 'professional' printers, and they don't always share your ideas in interpreting the image.

For any photography the best way forward is to experiment. There is no substitute for experience. :(

 

Digital - I went digital about the time you were writing your original post! I basically wanted the best spec I could get within my budget - about £250 - £290. I wasn't too impressed with what was on offer so I asked about secondhand cameras. I ended up with a high spec all singing all dancing Minolta Dimage7Hi with battery charger and extra 256Mb card for £270! AND..... It comes with a 1 year warranty. Give your local Jessops a try. If you use them regularly they should be very good to you. That might be a local thing but most camera shops are good to their regulars ;)

 

Video - As David says full manual control. Actually white balance isn't always a problem. If you're into filming your local bands' gigs then I'd not worry about it. Generally the auto WB is very good these days. I support Davids comments on focus and exposure except to say expose for the subject. Judging exposure isn't always easy. My camera has a zebra pattern option which puts stirpes over the over exposed parts of the image. The stripes don't appear on the film :blink: Video cams do handle IR and UV slightly differently to film and the eye. Best way to learn about it is to go and play!!!

 

Tim

[Guest lightnix]

Hello gaspipe58, welcome to the Blue Room :blink:

 

Some good tips there from everybody, here's a couple more...

 

If you have full manual control, try "bracketing" your exposures, i.e. take a series of shots of the subject (say five or so) across a range of apertures, each separated by a half or whole f-stop. Some posher 35mm SLR cameras had an "auto bracket" facility, although this was very film-hungry if used for each and every picture.

 

My old Olympus mju 2 was a great little point and shoot compact 35mm camera and went with me everywhere for years. Unfortunately it got a bit fussy about what film you put in it and would auto-rewind half way through any roll of film that wasn't top quality Kodak.

 

Prior to that, my main camera was a Canon AE1 program with a Tamron 28-135mm zoom lens. I used to fit a very light diffuser for most monochrome work (to make it look a bit dreamy) and a polariser for colour (to kill reflections and enrich colours).

 

For colour film I mostly used bog-standard Kodacolour at 400 ISO, which gave slightly warm tones, with Fuji film being possibly better for greens and blues. Hassle with getting the correct colour balance at the printers was simply avoided by using colour slide film. For mono film, I was a great fan of Ilford XP stock; it used the standard C41 colour process, which made it much cheaper to develop. With it, you could also vary the film speed setting from shot to shot, with the film in the camera, from as low as 50 ISO all the way up to 1600 ISO meaning it could handle just about every lighting situation, from full-on sun in the alps right down to a single candle in an otherwise dark room.

 

Nowadays, I have a small Kyocera digital camera (3.2 megapixel), usually set to spot or centre weighted metering. I use spot mode when there is no hurry to take the picture. I "wave it around the shot" until I find the correct-looking exposure, push the button down half way to auto-focus, then compose and take the pic. If there's a lot of action I use center weighting and just point and shoot. It's normally set to auto WB, but if there's a range of colour temperatures shining down, I'll try to do a user-defined one to fall back on.

 

I find that blacks are stronger with digital cameras, although colours can look a bit washed out and "videoish" sometimes. My digital camera overexposes somewhat for my tastes and I usually set the exposure to -1 or -2 stops to counteract this.

 

As mentioned previously, avoid flash wherever possible. It can be used with some success on SLR cameras, by diffusing and / or pointing it at the ceiling (although you will need to experiment with the exposure settings).

 

Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and the like will give you all the facilities of a darkroom and then some. I use PS most often to convert colour to monochrome, but also sometimes to boost contrast a bit and/or increase the saturation very slightly to deepen the blacks and enrich the colours à la the polarising filter. If I'm scanning pictures for PS, I'll usually do a very hi-res (1200 dpi) scan, which picks up the grain on 400 ISO or over. The downside of this is that you get a massive file, which takes ages to do anything to, although it's often worth the wait in the end.

 

Compostion: I usually compose pictures according to the "Rule of Thirds" or the "Golden Mean". These are the two most commonly used composition techniques. You can find them explained (along with other aspects of picture composition) on this site.

[gaspipe58]

With regard to monochrome - develop it yourself! :blink: It really isn't difficult and allows you to 'tune' things to your own taste. You don't need a darkroom just a daylight tank. I use the bathroom. A tank and chemicals shouldn't cost more then £20 if you shop around. Printing is another matter

I like Fuji neopan1600 pushed to 3200 and developed in Ilford Microphen.

[Dave]

I used to do a fair bit of show photography years ago, using Canon SLRs and fuji slide films at 400 and 1600 ASA. I tended to use the 400 ASA with a 50mm lens and the 1600 ASA with an 80-200 zoom lens. Worked very well. Never really tried anything serious with a digital camera, though.