Dim the House Lights

Chris Buhlmann's Tamron SP 70-200mm F/2.8 lens makes an encore appearance to capture a multi-night high-school variety show.

Article By Jennifer Gidman

Images by Chris Buhlmann

Those preshow photography sessions also provide the opportunity for what Buhlmann calls the "less serious" shots. "I want to create a storyboard for these kids so they remember everything that was involved with putting on such a show," he explains. "I try to capture the off-performance moments as well as the performance itself. I'll also take this time before the show to hone in on certain details, such as the writing on a set of cymbals, or a performer's fingers on the frets of guitar."

For this type of performance, in which lighting is usually volatile, Buhlmann recommends using the auto white balance on your camera. "Between songs or pieces in a show like this, the light constantly changes," he says. "There's almost no way (unless you went to a dress rehearsal and took detailed notes) to have your camera set up for every different scene. If you trust your camera's white balance, that's the way to go."

Shooting in all RAW is also advisable. "I'm fortunate that the white balance on my camera does a pretty good job of adjusting, but if you don't like something you've shot and you've only shot in JPEG, you'll never be able to correct it," Buhlmann says.

He doesn't let his camera auto-set exposures for these types of indoor performances. "Look how much contrast you have," he says. "In the shot of the performer dressed in all black and wearing shades, for example, what's going to happen if you try to meter just on the black lit subject? It's going to add exposure because it's trying to drive everything to middle gray. I think when I shot this, my camera meter said I was underexposing by two stops. But it was wrong, because what it was trying to do was make the black shirt look gray. I'll take multiple shots, look at my histogram, check those shots out, then adjust and start shooting away."

Buhlmann approaches the performance itself much like he does indoor sports. "You need to get to about 1/200th of a second to freeze the action that's going on onstage," he says. "You get any lower than that, you're going to get some movement. That said, sometimes you might be looking for a little bit of that movement to help accentuate the shot."

With the 70-200, Buhlmann is able to keep his aperture constant at F/2.8 and scale in and out. "With a lens like this, you can get pretty wide for a stage performance or focus in on one person, and you don't have to be worried about exposure because you're at a constant F/2.8," he says. "You'll have to adjust your ISO settings so you get the shutter speed and the effects you want. I usually shoot around 1600 to 2000 ISO for images like this."

Different Perspectives Conjure Creativity

If a performance is going on for more than one night, Buhlmann tries to attend as many as he can. "By going more than once to see the same performance, it allows me to get something maybe I missed the first time around," he explains. "I obviously can't be everywhere on that first night, and maybe while I'm shooting something I might think, 'You know, tomorrow night I'm going to shoot it from that side instead.'"

He put this technique into action with one of his favorite shots of the performance sequence: a young man playing a blue guitar. "With the 70-200, I was able to get up above the stage in the overhead acoustic rafters, then shoot it the next night from floor level off to the left," he says. "I was able to get a whole new perspective on the same player, but instead of front-to-back depth, I got left-to-right depth. Both images turned out really cool."

To accentuate the guitar player, Buhlmann used a black-and-white filter during post-processing. "Using this mode allowed me to keep that cord nice and bright, which really brings your eye back up to the amp and drives the depth in that shot," he explains. "If I had shot this as a regular black-and-white, the cord would have blended right into the floor."

To see more of Chris Buhlmann's work, go to www.chrisbuhlmann.com.