Photos: Robin Hood play

posted by Andy

FINALLY! The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood at the Majestic is over. Yay! Besides making the hats, a pair of giant Wii controllers, and helping out with a few of the Merry Men tunics, I managed to photograph the dress rehearsal and get discs burned in time to hand out to parents at the strike party. Relatives can never have enough photos of nephews, nieces and grandkids in silly costumes.


The Towns Guy, or narrator, expert wii bowler and master of the fade out scene change.


Maid Marian, Robin and the Merry Men meet for the first time after lifting the Sheriff's gold. I was "hat-guy". The Merry Men caps are simply triangles of felt folded in half with a strip sewn around the side.




Robin attempting to hide in Maid Marian's room while the Sheriff searches.


Robin waits in the background as his stunt double prepares to take a beating from the evil Prince John's guards.


That crown took some thought and planning to get a design that looked both suitably pompous, cartoony, and ridiculous. It's foam core with yellow paper glued around the outside and folder over the edges.


The Sheriff of Nottingham with his oversized wiimote, part of his backup plan to thwart Robin Hood. The play's theme was "cartoon" so I HAD to make a pair of giant wii controllers to suite the silliness of the play. They were constructed entirely from foamcore and poster board. I hope they survive the show's run, I'd like at least one for my office.


The fawning ladies cheer during the final competition between Robin and the Sheriff. Angie made all the dresses. Their wigs were ordered from an online costume store, and I borrowed the pink one for Halloween.


Robin and the Sheriff's wii bowling competition degenerates into some form of wii battle.

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Theater photography is a great challenge - low light, no flash and unpredictable action. You gotta shoot from the hip, just like nature photography. Capturing that great pose is worth filling up 2 GB with blurred, too dark or closed-eyes shots.

I've had the most success taking a monopod, using 400 ISO and putting the camera on manual. Then adjust the shutter speed as needed to get passable exposure levels. I sometimes forget to increase the speed when the lights go brighter and end up with a few washed out photos. And of course they're always the shots that would have been perfect. Also, shooting in RAW (digital negative format) gives great flexibility to adjust for color and lighting after the fact. One of the challenges is fixing stage lighting. While color gels work on stage, in photos it looks more like poor color balance.

I've got the process down to a science: Open RAW file, choose "auto-adjust" or "previous settings", tweak the sliders, crop, import into Photoshop, run a batch action witch pops up dialogs for color balance, fade auto-contrast and fade auto-color. Then save as jpeg. Rinse and repeat.

The real reward is to go back through my favorite shots and make black and white or apply other effects to the shot. Stacking and mixing warm and cool B&W images sometimes gives unexpected depth. Next, I'm going to finally give in and try the old high contrast HDR gimmick effect.