“Hay Fever” Review in Benicia Herald

This was from a while ago, but I hold a special place in my heart for my hometown paper. They reviewed a show at Dreamweavers and used my production stills from the show.

http://beniciaherald.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/charming-%E2%80%98hay-fever%E2%80%99-continues-dreamweavers%E2%80%99-winning-season/

As always, Dreamweavers provided a great show with a lot of beautiful lighting for me to shoot. I never find myself going over ISO 1600 there.

Shot with a Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L, and I set a custom white balance to the key lights to nail accurate colors. I always shoot RAW when shooting theatre (or pretty much anything, for that matter).

I shoot in RAW for a couple of reasons: It lets me fine-tune white balance, even though I set a custom WB at the beginning of the shoot. It also gives me latitude to bump up shadows and tame highlights where necessary. Theatrical lighting, by it’s nature, is quite hard and directional. Where one portion of the scene can be perfectly exposed, another portion can be either lost in total darkness or overexposed and too bright.

To set a custom white balance, I use a standard Kodak 18% Grey Card. There are much fancier white balance systems out there, but this one is simple and accurate. These cards were originally meant for determining exposure, and they work great for that, but the grey is perfectly neutral in color and works beautifully to set white balance for digital cameras.

Here’s the link to the whole gallery.