A.D. Drumm Images, LLC – Landscape, Portrait, and Fine Art Photography in Rochester MN Photography

It seems I’ve been remiss keeping my blog up-to-date! Well, yes, I have been busy this summer. I shot several shows including one up in Red Wing at the beautiful Sheldon Theatre. I also shot my first Bat Mitzvah which was fun and interesting and a learning experience.

Oh, and I just returned last week from a two-week trip to Italy which remains one of my favorite countries. I spent a few days in Roseto Valfortore in the Puglia region (which apparently the English speaking world calls Apulia). I took my small travel camera (the Olympus OM-D EM10 I’ve written about) and still have many photos to cull through. When I do, I am sure I’ll add a new post about the trip. Once I begin talking about it, it’s hard to get me to stop. So be forewarned.

I returned with a couple days to try adjusting to the time change before shooting Rock of Ages at the Civic. This is one of those lets use all this cool music and wrap a plot around it kind of shows. None of the seriousness of Fiddler or Cabaret. What it has is fun music and almost as much energy as a four year old!

While other shows will sometimes have the band on stage, here they’re a more integral part of the show. That’s apparent right from the start when the guitarists are downstage center at the beginning of the show. As soon as I saw this and began shooting, my reaction was, “this is like shooting a concert!” That realization flipped a switch, and I then shot the show mostly as though it was a concert. Quite differently from my normal show photography mode.

Where I’m normally a stickler for straight, level photos, here I was shooting all sorts of angles. Instead of lots of long-lens shots, I was shooting much of it wide angle, in-your-face.

Among other things, this meant I really needed to move around a lot, running  from one side to the other. That things happen quickly increasing the necessity of moving.

So it was different. And different can be good. In this case, it was a ton of fun to photograph.

Like most musicals, there were cool costumes and lighting. Unlike most musicals, the costumes included a lot of long hair – the music is from the 1980s hair metal era – and the lighting was often supplemented with smoke.

It all added together to make for some interesting photos.

There were the typical challenges, though, like bright spots and some LED lights down front that have to be dealt with. Mostly, those are things I have worked out. I could spend my time thinking how to shoot a particular scene and where to position myself.

There were a handful of photos that struck me as good black and white candidates. With the vivid colors, it sometimes takes something of a leap of faith to throw that away and go monochromatic. But a photo will sometimes speak to me and push me over that hurdle to give it a try.

All-in-all, it was a great way to get back into the routine after my vacation. There are three more weekends of shows. If you like live rock music and like when it pulls you in and you feel you are a part of the experience, you have to go! Oh – and I saw it as an audience member on opening night. I don’t think I’ve ever been to another show in which everyone in the audience was on their feet before the curtain calls began. So, yeah, it’s like that.

More to come. Time to work on my Italy photos now…

Mary Poppins is the spring musical this season at Rochester Civic Theatre. It opened on April 1, so the third weekend of four begins tonight. As I’ve been doing, I shot the show during the final dress rehearsal before Preview night.

The stage musical version of Mary Poppins is similar to the movie, but there are a fair number of changes and new songs. It’s a pretty technical show to put on with lots of set pieces moving on and off and a good bit of stage magic to pull off.

It’s a pretty long show as many musicals are, but the talent on stage is amazing, and the time just flies.

Like many musicals, there are some great colors, both costumes and lighting, which make for some fun photos. I do like that!

There’s also an abundance of choreography and several big numbers. Photographing those, it’s a balancing act of trying to capture the whole stage to convey a sense of the grandeur of the number and grabbing closer shots, usually of the main characters.

Smallish web photos miss some of the impact of the wider shots, but I think they still work.

One scene in the stage show not in the movie is the toys coming to life. The lighting through that is great, it’s visually very cool. It’s also the scary scene for some of the audience!

Shooting this sort of show does demand a lot from your equipment and your experience – both shooting and in post. It was a real mix of fairly dark scenes and brightly lit scenes with spots thrown in for good measure.

Sometimes, you get everything right and that’s a good feeling.

And sometimes, especially at the end of big numbers, the director has blocked everyone into a group that creates a terrific photographic composition. So, you have to be ready for those, because you really don’t want to miss such amazing shots.

In March, I helped backstage at Children’s Dance Theatre’s production of The Mermaid. I was one of four people working the flying wires – some of the mermaids “flew” under the sea. I hadn’t crewed a show for quite a while, and I forgot how much fun it is.

A call went out looking for help for Mary Poppins – it requires quite a number of folks helping backstage – and I decided to volunteer to crew some of the performances.

That gave me the opportunity to take some behind-the-scenes pics.

You have to be careful, of course. First, if you’re part of the crew, you have a job. So, you can only pull out the camera when you’re between things. For many scenes, I didn’t shoot a single frame.

Then, you have to honor the sight-lines – the areas where you can be and not be seen by the audience. Sometimes, that means you don’t have a good shot of the on-stage happenings at all. But, there are other photos waiting for you if you look.

These big musical productions at RCT have been earning a reputation for their quality. This combined with the popularity of certain titles have resulted in sell-outs. For this show, the entire run was sold out before opening night. A shame for many would-be attendees or folks who loved the show and want to see it again, but great for the theatre and the community for providing such support for the arts.

Two more weekends of performances – I hope you have your ticket!

This past week, I photographed Rochester Civic Theatre’s latest production, Almost, Maine. It’s a show made up of eight stories happening during one evening in the not-quite-town called Almost, Maine.

A ninth, somewhat shorter story bookmarks the others.

Greg, the director, likens it to the film, Love Actually. Its setting in Maine, in winter, with the northern lights showing up in the background of the outdoor scenes, speaks pretty well to a Minnesota audience.

Friday, we attended opening night. It’s always interesting to find out what I missed of the dialog and story while I was shooting the show. Like some of the references to the same places and some of the same people from one story to the next.

There were some scenes taking place indoors, and for those the lighting was a bit more intense. But the outdoor scenes were pretty dimly lit as usual for such nighttime scenes. There is plenty of physical comedy, too, so that was a challenge of this show.

Nearly all the stories involve just two people. That provides a lot of freedom for how I frame up the subjects to tell a story.

On the other hand, that also means their interactions and reactions won’t be amplified by other folks around them. So, I think the photos are somewhat more intimate.

The aurora background was pretty cool, and it did come across in several of my photos. The lighting overall was great.

Even though it provides a challenge technically for shooting the show, I love the look of the “nighttime” scenes. There’s a moodiness to them that adds atmosphere to the shots. Many non-musicals have none of that or only one or two such scenes. Here, there’s an abundance.

There’s also a mood portrayed by the sparse set. I’m often amazed how we humans can interpret the few lines of stick figures or make creatures from clouds. A few walls and a door and we know what we’re looking at. And we can then focus on the actors and their story instead of the set. We seem to accept it readily in theatre. Probably not so much in film.

The show is running for only two more weekends. It’s a terrific show, and you can feel the enthusiasm and fun the cast is having. It’s contagious. What better way to spend a cold Minnesota winter evening?

The current show at Rochester Civic Theatre is Catch Me if You Can – The Musical, a musical adaptation of the movie, itself an adaptation of the book. I remember reading the book some time before the movie. It was intriguing both because of the sheer gumption of Frank Abagnale, especially at such a young age, and the insecurity of so many institutions like banks. He was able to forge checks using the system against itself. While a lot of what he did would no longer work, the computer-driven world has its own insecurities. As we’ve seen.

I remember wondering how this story would work as a musical. My first question was if they portrayed Abagnale’s time in a French prison. The description in the book was not happy. Perhaps in a musical like Les Mis it might work. But, no, there is no prison scene.

There is an abundance of fun songs and – in this production – a ton of great dancing. The players worked their tales off, and it shows!

The sets are pretty simple with a few pieces moving on and off stage between scenes. That lets scene changes become more-or-less nonexistent. Often, as a song happens down stage right, things are moving behind them and suddenly we’re into the next scene.

When I saw the show as an audience member on opening night, I was able to pay more attention to this. There were one or two scenes that actually take a few seconds, but most happen almost seamlessly. For shooting, it meant it was pretty constant from the start until intermission and then until the end. For the audience, it means the show moves fast.

Shooting the show, it’s musical theatre standard methods. Lots of colorful costumes, gel’d lights, spots. There’s a lot of dancing, many big dance numbers. All challenging and all rewarding when you get a good photo.

These shows are a bit more work in post, as well, mainly to cope with the large dynamic range especially when spots are used.

There are hot spots (from normal lights, not spot lights) to deal with, too. I have developed some tricks to work around these issues.

There are also  some things you can do in a theatre photo that look good but wouldn’t work at all for many other types of photography.

It’s all about lights and lighting and, I think, about how we interpret what we see. And what we expect to see.

The other problem I sometimes have with musicals is culling the shots down. Visually, there is so much happening and so much movement that there are many photos one can (and this one does) take. Eventually, I have to ask if each shot tells something of the story or if it’s not much different from some other shot.

Do I keep the really nice photo of the couple sitting on the gurney staring lovingly into each others eyes, or the fun one with the pillow and laughs? I end up keeping both.

A drama just doesn’t produce as many. When a show is dialog-driven, the actors may move around to keep the intensity for the audience, but for still photography, the goal is more to find that one angle, the one photo that communicates the emotion of that interaction.

For a musical, it’s in some ways more of an event, a performance of singing and dancing that we’ve come to enjoy. So I want my photos to bring that across. Sometimes, there’s a deeper meaning or darker mood to a musical, and those provide challenges which seem to cross the two genres.

Catch Me runs just one more weekend. It’s immensely entertaining, the music is great, and the RCT cast and crew will keep you engaged and laughing. A truly fun show!