The Pillowman at JMU

Unfortunately this didn't come out the way I wanted as I have somehow misplaced my serial number for Final Cut Studio, and had recently wiped my harddrive. So I had to put this together using iPhoto, but it still turned out pretty good. This is a slideshow of some shots I took during a dress rehearsal of The Pillowman down in Harrisonburg,VA. The show is DEFINATELY not for kids, but it was extremely well done. Easily the best show I've seen put on at any school or any community theater. If you get a chance you should definately check it out they're opening show is tomorrow night (Tuesday the 11th) and they have shows running all week long.

Lighting is fantastic, great mood. Acting is really top notch and really gets to you. I won't spoil the show for you though.  If I get a chance I'll be going down Friday to actually sit back and watch it without a camera in my hand, as hard as that may be for me :) Let me know what you think!

These are some of my favorite shots from the show. I wanted to post these, as the compression on the video will make most of the shots look like they were taken with cell phone...(seriously, who takes pictures with a cellphone?)

Harrisonburg Day Two

Well the plan was to go out early and take some shots of some models around downtown Harrisonburg, but these college students decided to sleep in (the nerve of them  :P   ). Anyway it was a nasty rainy day anyway, so I decided to play around with some lighting effects today. Using my newly made Pringsnoot I took some shots of the cast members and crew of The Pillowman before their rehearsal today. (I took a bunch of photos during the rehearsal which I'll upload in a slideshow tomorrow or Sunday).

Jesi, quite creepy as a ragdoll/puppet...

Speedy, aka Foofa, is quite the mannquine. He even threw himself down a short flight of stairs to get into character (or maybe he just said that after he tripped)
Kristen has a fantastic smile that just doesn't go away.

After rehearsal, back at my sisters place I wanted to take it up a notch and forced Jon to be my model, while he was tweaking some shots he got during the show on my laptop. The first shot shows how tight the snoot would be restricting the light. The second shot shows the 'lighting modifier' I used to get the nice stripes across Jon's face. The third image shows the snooted flash with the amber gel, acting as a hair/fill light to give the image a little extra.

1 BILLION points to whoever can guess what time of day this was taken at.

I can't decide which of these two images I like better. The top one seems more environmental with the filled in background with the various gear I had out of my bag at the time. The second seems more personable showing some personality in the subject. Any opinions?

I had to throw in this last shot. My sister has this bright red pot on her stove and I thought it really stood out. A gelled SB-800 at 1/32 power in a pitch black dark room, made it pop a little more I think...I was amazed at how well this came out. Manual focus with absolutely no constant light, total luck.

Harrisonburg Day One

Well it's 10:30AM and I've been up for 2 hours waiting for my sister and Jon to wake up so we can go do something, while I'm waiting I perused some shots I took yesterday. Jesi was suppossed to have call for her rehearsal yesterday at 1PM which got changed to 2PM, then when we arrive at her theater...it turns out they won't be starting until 6PM! So Jon and I went exploring Harrisonburg and found an old burned out building that looked like something out of a horror movie, I was just imagining some deranged lunatic jumping out of dark closets and climbing out through holes in the walls. Fortunately (as you can tell since I'm writing this the next day) that no such thing happened. What can I say we had 4 hours to kill and since it was spring break for the school a lot of places were closed!

Told you it was a fire!

Quite a skylight

I was telling Jon how sharp the 50mm f/1.8 is and I held up my finger a did a 100% crop...you could give that image to the police and get an arrest with that much detail...if I was guilty of anything that is.

When we got back to Jesi's place with about 1.5 hours left to kill we found a bottle of acai extract juice something or other. It had some sort of substance floating in it, probably acai seeds right?

I noticed a little warning sign on the bottle that said "WARNING: Shellfish" and decided to check the contents in total disbelief...sure enough, whichever of Jesi's roommates owns this bottle is DRINKING shrimp. I'm definitely a fan of shrimp, but I prefer mine separate from my beverage.
When we arrived back at the theater we found out they were not going to start until 7:30/8PM now(they finally started at 9PM and finished at 2AM). Later we went to Subway for dinner, which happened to be connected to a convenience store and saw some tubes of Pringles chips. (How convenient for me!) I remembered reading a post on strobist.blogspot.com about a snoot made out of a Pringles can. For those of you who have never been to Strobist, go now. David Hobby (owner of Strobist and a Speedlite Guru) is a genius when it comes to off camera lighting. 

For those of you who don't know what a 'snoot' is, a snoot is a tube designed to restrict the spread of light from a flash or continuous light source. The idea is to get a nice tight circle of light that you can either isolate a feature on a model or item you are shooting to create an interesting lighting effect for a background. Normally these are used on flashes that are on stands off camera, giving some truly stunning images, but I couldn't wait to snap a few pictures with my new Pringsnoot and threw it and my 17-55 on Jon's D40 and fired away at the actors and actresses and stagehands that were looking at me like I was crazy when I was wrapping an empty Pringles tube in gaffers tape.

This is the effect a snoot has on a blank wall as a background. Cool huh?

Jon is snapping off some serious snoot action. It may look ridiculous but the results make it worth the effort and possible embarrassment.

We're going back today to watch yet another rehearsal so I'll be taking quite a few more images today and will post them up tomorrow. Got some awesome shots of the cast in their creepy puppet like makeup. Enjoy!