Posts Tagged ‘photographs’

Color Coded Pictures

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

I just got a set of photographs and a DVD from Color Codes: a point of hue, a dance piece I lit this past summer. The photographs are beautiful. But there are a lot and it will take a while to get through all of them to post anything. I am actually surprised that the pictures turned out as well as they did given that the piece was both very dark and high contrast. That is the overall light levels were dim and within that dimness there was a lot of shadow.

My sole complaint is that the color is off. They are not properly white balanced. The color range for the piece was very tight. All versions of “white light” using only color correction to keep the palette between incandescent and daylight colors.

In the pictures the nuance is lost and everything looks a lot more amber than it was live. But so goes it. Looking over the lighting for that piece it was interesting to see some of the choices I had made. The entire dance was about color, but instead of having the lighting play into that, we set the lighting against the piece and created shifting geometric forms out of white light. I remember being very pleased with the lighting and the pictures do show a wonderful visual coherence that is achieved by having the light step aside and play a different role than the narrative of the work itself.

In other points of interest I have discovered a plethora of creative commons distributed minimal techno record labels and that has made me very pleased. And my computer’s hard drive very full.

Quality Control and Photographic Integrity

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I just got a copy of the photographs from Lovers and Executioners that I lit this past fall in California. I am in the process of going through them and selecting the ones I want to post (There are a lot!). The shots were taken on the run-through before the first preview. We did a lot of work during that week of previews(six or seven shows all with extensive revisions) so the final lighting was quite different than that run.

Beyond that there are some interesting problems with the shoot. The photographer composed the shots to focus heavily on the foreground. While this was a major idea in the lighting it was not as extreme as it appears in the photographs. The scenery was not as dark relative to the actors at it looks in the shots. This issue is not quite as extensive as this one, but quite a bit more than I would like.

I have seen shots of my shows that look so different than the actual production that I have not posted them as I do not feel they are representative of my work. Sometimes this has been the case when the photographs make it look better! Its a matter of ethics. I would rather get work for what I did than what a photographer did. Still, those instances are representations of my work in the sense that the photographer captured the light I designed. But at some point artistic license shifts the ground of the artist upon whom the work lies.

Until I get these photographs processed, take a look at the preset once again. Isn’t it lovely?


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