Assignment With A Sign - TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

It All Started With A Sign: This was an assignment full of promise: A theater marquee, taken at twilight, the name of the event lit up for all all to see. Beneath the sign, Executive Director Phil Santora and Trustee Julie Kaufman, looking like Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen (Don Lockwood and Lena Lamont) on opening night, just basking in the warmth of devoted fans*. Alas, it was not to be.

Reality set in when I found out that this marquee "photo" was the product of some clever Photoshopping. Now I had less to work with. I was going to be photographing professional administrators who were busy keeping a non-profit organization running really smoothly instead of fictional characters from a 1950s musical.

What a photographer wants and what the subjects are able to provide often don't match. Time would be tight and I had to choose one of two possible time slots: 6:00 pm, and 1:00 - 1:45 pm the following day. There went my twilight sky, since sunset wouldn't occur until 8 pm. There was going to be lots of sunlight when the photo was taken. I took the 6:00 pm appointment, and hoped for the best.

The Fox Theater is on the south side of Broadway street, so I expected that the marquee would be in shadow. When I arrived at 5:30, I found that one face was in shadow, and one face was in full sunlight. If I chose the shaded side, I'd need to extend my light stand to aim an accent flash the log, and hand hold a second flash to illuminate my subjects. If I chose the sunny side, I'd probably have squinty expressions and some off-the-chart overexposure. 

As luck would have it, there were some benches and a convenient shade tree as you can see at the right of the frame. This meant that I wouldn't have to deal with direct sunlight on my subjects and could then light them with flash. Since I was outdoors. I didn't use and umbrella for fear it would be blown over by the wind. If I added weights to hole the lightstand in place, I could technically be required to have a permit to "block pedestrian traffic". So the flash was used "straight" with no light modifier. In some cases, the position of the light is more important than its quality.

Once I established the desired exposure for the theater logo, I could move my subjects until their heads covered the marquee. I would finally adjust my flash output to get proper exposure on my subjects. Unfortunately, positioning the subjects is an "on the fly" thing, and you can't know in advance exactly where the  subjects will be standing. Had I known the exact position, I could have looked up and aligned the flash for best effect. I suspect the flash was aimed too much towards camera right, resulting in some underexposure. Dodge and burn, dodge and burn, I managed to get a reasonable image, but certainly not of the best possible quality. I'm quite sure that by the time the photo is published, the degradation that all newspaper images suffer will conceal all the deficiencies that are currently driving me crazy. Or if I'm lucky, the image will be printed in black and white. Despite its shortcomings, my Editor declared the photo "VERY nice!". High praise indeed.

Depth Of Field Control: One aspect of the shot did merit some additional thinking. I was shooting at F 10.0, which gave me great depth of field. But what if I had installed a 3-stop neutral density filter? The shot could have  been made at approximate F 4.0 which would taken the sharp edge off of the lettering in the background. I've always had access to ND filters, but can remember using one only once for a published photo. If I think of them for depth-control rather than exposure control, I would be tempted to find space in the Big Bag and slip one or two in. I've owned a variety of Cokin filters, and maybe it's about time I started using them.

*Opening scenes from the movie "Singing In The Rain".