How to photograph a school play

Your child is in the school play, the star performer, but will your photos be stellar? This blog explains how to take great photos without flash.

First of all, you need a DSLR camera, your iphone or point and shoot camera will be too 'noisy' given the poor lighting conditions or it will try to compensate by triggering the flash thus disrupting the performance. Your lens should be able to zoom as much as possible e.g. use a 18-200mm lens rather than a 18-55mm lens. I normally use a 70-200mm lens.

Secondly, you need to change the metering mode of your camera to spot metering. Your camera takes a reading of the ambient light levels in order to calculate exposure but typically in a play, your child is illuminated against a dark background and your camera's light meter is tricked into thinking your child's face is dark so the camera will overexpose the scene and your child's face will be 'burnt out'.

Thirdly, you need to set your camera to manual mode. Then select at least 1/180th second for shutter speed because the actors are typically moving on stage and a shutter speed slower than this will result in blurred faces. Also set the widest aperture your lens offers (e.g. f4 v f22) - you need a wide aperture because the scene is dark and the wider the aperture, the more light will reach your camera's sensor which is necessary to avoid noise. Finally, let the ASA 'float':  I generally find the ASA floats between 2500 ASA and 6400 ASA when I set the shutter speed at 1/250th sec and the aperture at f2.8.

Fourthly, you need to decide if you want more than one actor in the frame and if you do, you need to hold the camera very still, focus on one actor and then without moving the camera, focus on the other actor/actors you want in the frame.  This is because when your aperture is wide open (e.g. f4)  there is a very shallow depth of field so it's unlikely anyone other than the actor you are focussing on will be sharp.

When you get home,  merge the two images into one using a program like Photoshop. The photos below demonstrate the before and after results using this technique.

Photo 1 - the girl is in sharp focus but no one in the background is

Photo 2 - the boy is sharp but the girl is blurred

The merged photo - both actors are in sharp focus

Photo 1 - the boy is in sharp focus but the girl isn't

Photo 2 - the boy is not in focus but the girl is

Merged photos - the boy from photo 1 has been combined with the girl from Photo 2

Factory photography and why it isn't portraiture

My daughter's school "photo" of her year turned up recently.  To call it a photo is wrong - made of flimsy paper, it felt like a shoddy photocopy. As for capturing a unique moment, it was anything but that - instead of being Year 9 2010, it could easily have been Year 11 1992.

Yet parents like me bought the photo, but were they buying it out of nostalgia for a time when school portraiture had value?

I had a similar experience when I went house hunting last weekend. Actually, it wasn't so much house hunting but house peeping because a house I had always admired was open for inspection and I couldn't resist a peek.  Inside the house, expected to go for $4.5m, were hideous portraits presumably of the various offspring.  It wasn't so much that the subjects were ugly (they weren't) but there was nothing beautiful about the photos - dull light, thoughtless background and no engagement of the subject with the photographer. The images had the feel of photos taken with a mobile phone, only those are usually spontaneous and the subject is laughing or putting on a party face. But the the photos in the grand house were taken by an eminent photographer, one who proudly signed each one.

So what's gone wrong? Why do people, even those with considerable assets, put up with such mediocrity? For me an appropriate comparison is factory farming. Not so long ago all chickens were organic, and they were a treat, not cheap, not to be thoughtlessly consumed daily. Overtime chickens became cheaper  as their rearing became mechanised to the current era where they are ubiquitous, cheap and devoid of taste. Yet we continue to consume them.

So it is with portrait photography. If we take the example of school portraits, they are often run by large commercial studios and typically, the photographer who turns up at school is a photographer in name only. A bit like calling a burger fryer at McDonalds a chef. The photographer is on a schedule, this school today, another tomorrow, so the individual portrait sessions are set up with standard lighting, a tedious artificial background used since the 1970's and there is nominal interaction between the photographer and the sitter.  Then the image is printed on thin measly paper and apparently, a portrait has been created.

I thought about this recently when I had to photograph five chefs and three front office staff for nilgiri's, an award winning Indian restaurant in Sydney. On average, I spent eleven minutes photographing each person .

My brief was to create portraits that would show off the team to the diners since the images would be hung in the restaurant. I interpreted this brief to mean photos that would make the diners feel good about the restaurant so they would be more likely to return. In other words, if the portraits were mechanical,  the sitters would look wooden but if the sitters looked passionate, confident and happy, then the diners would think the restaurant staff were proud of what they did. In short, if the warmth of the sitters was forced or lacking, the portraits would fail to sell the restaurant to the diners.

What did I have to do to achieve the portraits I was after? Firstly, in advance of the session, I had to be totally confident about the lighting setup - it had to allow flexibility (the staff were of different heights and would stand). So I spent two hours getting the light right to produce two lighting setups- one open, the other 'Rembrandtish'.  I used Swiss Elinchrom BXRI 500  lights with a large softbox on right, a smaller one on left and a reflector in front. These lights are wirelessly controlled which meant no worrying about tripping over cables. They are also 100% reliable and produce beautiful light. This meant I never had any doubt during the sessions - if I had, the subjects would have sensed my anxiety and not relaxed.

When each staff member arrived, I explained what I was trying to achieve - my message was simple, if you don't look happy, the clients won't  come back and the restaurant would fail- nothing like a bit of pressure but done with humour, it made them realise that we had a common objective, to make the restaurant look good, and one that couldn't be achieved by me alone. In short, their  unique personality was vital.  Then I asked them about themselves, where they came from in india, if they had kids etc. None of this interfered with the shoot, it didn't take long but it created a dialogue and in so doing, stopped the subjects feeling like they were in a police identification parade.

The results are the photos below which I turned into posters to give diners more relevant information. Needless to write, they are printed on beautiful thick (270gsm) lustrous paper made in France.

In summary, if you are not moved by the portraits you have commissioned, stop using the photographer who created them because the fault lies not in you but them! As for the cost, my granny had a very wise saying "quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten".