I shoot live stage without flash, in the natural light typically used during a dress rehearsal or live show. Doing this captures the feel of the performance, the performance the audience sees.
There are some consequences to shooting live and in natural light. Shutter speeds are low, film speeds high, and depth of field narrow. Low shutter speeds allow blur during movement, high film speeds add “grain” to the image (the lower the light, the more intense the grain effect), and narrow depth of field allows only the subject to be in focus. Combined, these things can add to the effect of the image, making you feel you’re there watching the show. Not properly anticipated, these things become your enemy and make shooting live very difficult.
I have found that you can’t really overcome stage lighting problems without supplemental light; you can only work with them through experience. This is what I bring to your show. Having shot thousands upon thousands of images in these conditions, I can work with your stage to gather the available assets and capture your event.
John Harris
Notes on shooting live stage
Live venues are designed to appeal to the human eye, not the camera. If this were not the case, we would all sit home and watch movies because movies and live stage would look the same, but they don’t. The amazing capacity of the human eye is to blame: the human eye can see over 11 light ranges (photographers call them f-stops) where the camera can see barely three. An example of this phenomenon: have you ever seen a person looking great in full sunlight and taken their picture, only to find that the shadow under their hat looks totally black when the photo is developed?
Live stage, being designed for the eye, is full of dark shades, contrasting light, poor color light, low light, and movement. Combine these things and we are confronted with a very difficult situation to photograph.