Summary:  I volunteered to shoot this play for my friend Jane. Her daughter Rogue Blake was appearing in it. While I was photographing I realized that these students were really good actors and played their parts exceptionally well for 6th, 7th and 8th graders. It was exciting to create the storyline of this play in pictures. My goal for each scene was to focus on the facial expressions and body language of each actor to convey their emotions and their actions whenever possible.

The Challenge:  I was excited about this shoot because I felt it would be a great lesson in low-light photography. I love shooting at night in well lit cities and small towns and this was the first time I was able to shoot a theatre production. I researched my method the night before and practiced shooting in my home with the lights at very low levels. Since a flash would be prohibited I learned and discovered the best method was to use shutter priority at 1/125 with a high ISO while using a monopod for stability. The pictures I took were clear and adequately exposed and I knew any irregularities I could easily correct in Photoshop since I would be shooting in RAW file format. When I arrived at the school auditorium and the lights went out I started my practice shots and it became clear that my planned method would not work because the auditorium was much darker than my home where I practiced the night before. I quickly experimented and determined the best method for this shoot would have to be in Automatic mode and with ISO set to Auto as well. I hardly ever shoot in Automatic mode but this was truly an exception that made sense since each scene would have different lighting conditions and a fixed shutter speed would not work. My first concern was that my shutter speed would fall too low and blur would be a problem, however I am very experienced with a monopod and a low shutter speed wouldn't matter too much. My second concern was that the ISO would go too high and would cause too much noise in the pictures. I was really impressed with the low-light capabilities of my Canon 7D and all of my practice shots had very good detail and little noise. The final pictures overall had very good detail and little noise with the exception of some very dark scenes. However, I was able to remove a significant amount of noise from those pictures with Topaz DeNoise AI without compromising image detail. I was pleasantly surprised at how well these pictures turned out.