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It was production photos time at the Garrick tonight. 

The play is Haywire, a comedy by Eric Chappell.  The play is on till Saturday 28th March.  Worth going to see.

Photographically (non-photographers might want to skip this paragraph!) I thought I try a something different with how I take the photos this time.  Normally with my theatre photography I work in appature priority mode, with typically anthing between -1 and -2 stops of exposure compensation.  For this play however I realised that the lighting wasn’t going to change much so I decided to work in manual mode.  Zooming in on an actor I took took an exposure reading with the camera’s metering system and set the camera to that setting.  I made sure the exposure was fast enough for me to hand hold, set the appature to wide open and the selected a suitable ISO rating to ensure the image was correctly exposed.  After taking a couple of shots and checking the histogram on the back of the camera to ensure my exposures were correct.  I was able to leave the camera settings alone – only adjusting them again when the stage lighting changed.  In this case only at the scene changes (2 per act) and even then the change was minimal only requiring a half stop change.  The result – less blown out highlights and overall I think better exposed images.  It would be a lot harder to use this method in a play with lots of frequent light changes but I guess the more I work in manual mode for theatre work the quicker and more natural this way of working will become.