iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Theater Performances

Capturing stage performances is difficult even for professional photographers. What makes theater lighting tricky is that the bright main light on the actors is often right in the same frame with a subdued or even darkened background. If you photograph this composition “as is” in automatic mode, then the camera calibrates the exposure, brightening up the image enough to display the dominant dim background. As a result, the spotlighted actors turn into white-hot, irradiated ghosts.

Your built-in flash is useless under these conditions (unless you climb right up onto the stage beside the actors, which is generally frowned upon by the management). The typical range for the camera’s flash is about ten feet, after which it’s about as useful as a snow-cone machine in Alaska. Turn your flash off at theater performances—because it’s annoying to the rest of the audience, because it’s worthless, and because it’s usually forbidden.

To overcome this challenge, use the other tools built into your camera. If you have a spot meter mode, you have a fighting chance. As noted previously, your camera generally gauges the brightness of the scene by averaging the light across the entire frame—a recipe for disaster when you’re shooting the stage.

Spot metering, however, lets you designate a particular spot in the scene whose brightness you want the camera to measure. (You indicate what spot that is by positioning a frame marker that appears in the center of the frame.) Point the spot-metering ...