On Tuesday evening the camera club I belong to was invited by a local theatre to go along to the dress rehearsal of one of their plays to take some pictures. I was up for a new challenge and being as though it’s not a genre I’ve ever photographed before I went along. There were half a dozen other club members and only about 10 people in the audience, so I had a front row seat and we were also allowed/encouraged to walk about if we wished.

I sometimes got so engrossed in the play, ‘A Doll’s House’ by Henrik Ibsen, that I forgot I was there to take pictures and I admit my neck was killing me by 10pm after sitting with my arms up and my finger on the shutter button for almost 3 hours, but it was a really enjoyable night. It also forced me to brush up on my camera skills, as the lighting was low, tricky and constantly changing and of course the actors were moving around the stage constantly. It was a juggling act of trying to keep ISO (and therefore noise) low while still having a fast enough shutter speed to capture any motion.

Editing the images took several hours. Lots of converging verticals in the background, harsh contrasts, facial shadows, noise (then of course softness!) and some very strange colour casts to deal with due to the studio lighting, so I made a preset in Photoshop Camera RAW to speed up the initial process and used the same settings in Topaz DeNoise for each picture, both of which helped.

If this is something which interests you it’s always worth contacting local theatres to see if they would allow you to go along to photograph dress rehearsals – there’s usually a trade-off in that they will want to be able to use any pictures you take on social media etc, which is fine as you get unfettered access to the production. Here are some of my images from the night: