Lighting

One in a series of 23 headshots I took for Missouri Street Theatre. One hour to light it, one hour to shoot it…for all 23 people! Book your headshot session by clicking here.

Company portrait of Aris Roberson for Missouri Street Theatre’s production of “Once Upon A Mattress.” Photo by Mike Padua.

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One in a series of 23 headshots I took for Missouri Street Theatre. One hour to light it, one hour to shoot it…for all 23 people! Book your headshot session by clicking here.

Company portrait of Kirstin Pieschke for Missouri Street Theatre’s production of “Once Upon A Mattress.” Photo by Mike Padua.

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See more work on my website.

One in a series of 23 headshots I took for Missouri Street Theatre. One hour to light it, one hour to shoot it…for all 23 people! Book your headshot session by clicking here.

Company portrait of Ethan Bell for Missouri Street Theatre’s production of “Once Upon A Mattress.” Photo by Mike Padua.

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See more work on my website.

One in a series of 23 headshots I took for Missouri Street Theatre. One hour to light it, one hour to shoot it…for all 23 people! Book your headshot session by clicking here.

Company portrait of John Ewing for Missouri Street Theatre’s production of “Once Upon A Mattress.” Photo by Mike Padua.

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See more work on my website.

It’s official: my new website has launched. It’s much easier and smoother to navigate, and it’s optimized to work on big screens, small screens, and everything in between. The pictures are beautifully displayed and all the functionality to deliver pictures to clients quickly and securely remains.

HUGE thanks to Photoshelter for providing the amazing tools they do for photographers.

Check it out!

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I took a little break from shooting theatrical and film productions to focus more on shooting headshots this year–or at least I thought I did. It turns out I’ve shot almost as many productions (both theatre and film) as I did the previous year, in addition to the headshots. This is just the professional stuff–there’s so much more personal work that I’ve shot that I haven’t even begun to sort through. Here’s a little review of some of the work I did 2013.

Theatrical Productions

The Fourth Messenger – A new, original musical by Tanya Shaffer, Directed by Matt August. See the whole gallery.

Sweeney Todd – Presented by Bay Area Stage, Directed by Jeff Lowe. See the whole gallery.

Funny Girl – Presented by Lucky Penny Productions, Directed by Barry Martin. See the whole gallery.

Wonder of the World – Presented by Napa Valley Playhouse and Lucky Penny Productions, Directed by Taylor Bartolucci. See the whole gallery.

Desire, Despair, Destiny & Death! – Presented by Opera Bravura. Check out their schedule of shows.

The Importance of Being Earnest – Presented by Bay Area Stage, Directed by Jeff Lowe. See the whole gallery.

Films

“New,” directed by John Harden. Cinematographer Kirk Douglas and Director John Harden discuss the next shot.

Rise,  Directed by Scott O’Hara. Check it out on Facebook.

Story of Eva, Directed by Tom Woodbeck. Left to right: Sound Engineer David Minard, Cinematographer Jason Morris, Director Tom Woodbeck. Check it out on Facebook and their website.

Headshots

And of course, I focused on shooting actors and performers headshots in 2013. One notable instance was shooting 23 headshots within an hour for the entire cast of Missouri Street Theatre’s “Once Upon a Mattress:”

Click here for headshot information.

Missouri Street Theatre‘s production of Once Upon a Mattress needed portraits of all 23 of their cast, and we had an hour to set up and light on location, and then one hour to shoot all 23 people. Up to the task? Of course I was…but it would have been difficult without an assistant to help schlep and set up lights, stand in for test shoots, then take names of all 23 people and help move the line along. That’s where my trusty assistant Victor came in:

I opted for simple: one key light directly above, a silver reflector below, and two back lights camera left and right against white seamless.

The biggest challenge was pulling real expressions out of people instead of the “say cheese” expressions you normally see in wham-bam, super fast cattle call portraits. I had 20 seconds to build rapport with someone who I’d never met, so that I could elicit real expressions and then about a minute and a half to shoot about 7-8 pictures. I was careful not to just spray and pray, and really worked on getting subjects to laugh, smile and express something genuine with their eyes…23 times.

The results were posted in Fairfield’s Downtown Theatre lobby along with each performer’s bio during the run of the show. It was an especially fun assignment since I had once nephew assisting and another nephew performing in the show.

Here’s a little preview of the results, but you’re going to have to see the show if you want to see the final, printed lobby shots:

Info on booking headshots, in studio and on location, can be found on my website.

Vallejo Shakespeare in the Park presents "Othello"

Vallejo Shakespeare in the Park will be presenting “Othello” this summer and I had the opportunity to create some promo photographs for their show. The main differences with the promotional photography and production photography is that with the promo stuff, I light and pose the actors. With production photos, I’m basically a fly on the wall during a dress rehearsal–commonly during tech week, and more commonly during the very last dress rehearsal before a show opens–when the show is picture ready.

Theatre companies need the promo pictures well before a show opens so they can (you guessed it) promote the show with plenty of time before it opens. This is especially important because prospective audience members are more likely to go see a show if they have a way connect with the characters beforehand.

For the shot(s) above, I shot the actors separately against a green screen, lit them with small flashes with shoot-through umbrella attachments, and created a composite in Photoshop. I went into the shoot with a firm concept of what the final product was going to be, so I lit and posed each actor accordingly.

For Othello, I knew I wanted to bring out the contours of his face and create depth with strong shadows, so I placed my main light camera left at a hard 90 degree angle towards the subject, which fills in his face but also casts a distinct shadow to the right of the camera. I then placed a fill light at a 45 degree angle camera right. This gave me a face that was well lit, and shows us exactly what Othello looks like, but it’s not flat and evenly lit.

For Iago, I wanted his face more filled in, but with one side more  “lost” in shadow–almost as if he was being obscured by Othello’s shadow. I placed the key light 45 degrees camera right and angled his face just so that one side was almost completely obscured except for his eye–people always focus on the eyes, so I didn’t want to lose it. I had one more light behind and above him to give his hair a little depth, but I didn’t want a classic back/rim light scenario–just a tiny splash of light on his hair.

Finally, I wanted to give Desdemona the same light/shadow depth that I gave Othello. I had to walk the lights back a couple of feet since I shot a bit wider to get more body length. Due to the way she was posed, I noticed that the fill light being at 45 degrees was hitting her flat against her back, and the contours of her arm seemed to get lost, so both the main and fill light were placed 90 degrees on either side of the frame.

I took these shots using the Canon EOS 7D with the ST-E2 Speedlite Transmitterattachment. Even though the 7D features wireless flash control built in, there’s less digging into menus when I use the ST-E2. I used three 430EX II flashes on light stands, two of them with umbrellas.

After the shoot, I went through the usual workflow of Photo Mechanic > Lightroom > Photoshop to create the final composite image you see at the beginning of the post. Lots of fun, and more planning and post-production involved than a dress rehearsal shoot, but the end result was really worth it. One thing I regret is not capturing behind the scenes photos of the lighting setups themselves. Because of limited budgets, I didn’t have an assistant on this shoot so all the lightstand moving was done by yours truly. Hopefully next time I’ll have a bit more time to do so.

Make sure to check out the event here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=123487851078062

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.

I was asked to shoot “specials” for a modern-styled rendition of Julius Caesar. Specials are promotional photographs to be used in marketing materials before the production starts. The big difference with the specials is that usually, I will do the lighting in a studio space instead of using the stage lights. I’ve always been a big fan of of promo photographs because I feel that a prospective audience member is more likely to want to see a play when they can see, and connect with, actors in the production.

Take a look Broadway.com and you’ll see that the website is filled with photos that entice someone to buy a ticket to see a show. Another great example are movie posters–they almost always feature a photograph of the lead players to establish a connection for someone who is trying to decide which play or movie to see.

A special thanks to the director, cast, and crew of this show–this shoot was a lot of fun.

On a technical note, the battery in my ST-E2 wireless flash trigger went dead, and I didn’t have a spare. Luckily, we were in a small space and I just used the 7D’s built-in wireless flash control. Whew. I promptly bought spare batteries for the ST-E2.

I used some pretty simple tools to light these: One 430EX Speedlite on a light stand as a main light, One 420EX Speedlite as a backlight. I did not have umbrellas for this shoot–not because I forgot them, but because I didn’t own any. To diffuse and soften the main light, I used a fold-out reflector that has a removable cover that turns it into a giant diffuser, set up on its own stand. If I didn’t have something to diffuse the light, I would have bounced the light off of something–theatres always have prop doors or partitions laying around, so there’s a lot of ways to get creative to soften the light.