Dave is directing the next play at Magenta Theater, Talent for Murder, and I am his assistant director. I also am the photographer for promotional pictures. Last night we had our photo shoot with the cast. On the way to the theater Dave and I were brainstorming ideas of what sort of shots to take. They need to be interesting and have some action in them, and hopefully if someone sees the picture in the paper it will catch their eye and capture their interest.

The play is about a rich old woman and her scheming children who are trying to split up the estate and get their inheritance before she’s gone.

Dave wrangles the whole cast together and gives them the plan.

And, many shots later…

Then we had a little fun with the ‘kids’ fighting over the treasures

And with the ‘scheming’ angle…

So this was a pretty fun shoot, and I think we got some good shots. Hopefully they’ll end up in the paper and get us a little publicity!

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Yesterday was a lovely sunny afternoon, and we were downtown so Dave could do a skit at the theater for an Art-Walk type event that was going on. I hung around the theater a bit, and then went over to the park in downtown Vancouver,WA (Esther Short Park) and took pictures around there.

My main goal was experimenting with my camera,  taking all my pictures in manual mode and playing with aperture and exposure times.

First we had to get into town, since we live way out in the boonies…

I’m not sure what this sign was for, but I liked the color!

This is the clocktower in the park. I was trying to get a picture of it with flowers in the foreground, and have good focus across the whole picture. I felt a little weird squatting behind a big flowerpot trying to make that happen, and I felt a little nervous because people kept looking at me funny.

The moon was up, but this was the best shot I could get. If I had been willing to climb into the bushes for a minute, I could have lined it up so it looked like the fish was eating it, but I decided I was attracting enough attention as it was.

Different angle on the tower…

I liked the texture of the pavement under this leaf

This is one of the tallest buildings in downtown Vancouver. It’s a home for low-income seniors. My uncle lives there. It was built specifically for that purpose, and those guys have the best view in town because it overlooks the river and the I5 bridge!

Back at the theater, I got this shot of one of the actors waiting to go onstage. High ISO, and a long exposure because it was so dim. I like the shot, even with a little motion blur.

The skit they were doing was a silly little thing full of puns and sight gags. It was about a 15 minute show, and they did it every half hour for 3 hours! It was like a little marathon! That’s my handsome hubby holding the paper up 🙂

Then came the curtain call. This was another tricky shot to get because of the low light. I have to say though, I’m much happier with the quality of picture this camera can do with high ISO settings. That’s a big difference between it and my old Powershot, which had terrible picture quality if you bumped up the ISO.

On the way home I played with long (3 second) exposures (I wasn’t driving), and discovered that if I took them as we passed under the intersection signals I got really cool rays of light. This was my favorite of that bunch.

So that was my fun afternoon with my camera. Every picture taken in Manual mode after carefully considering what settings I wanted to use based on the light, and what I was going for. It was a great learning experience! Of course I took about a hundred pictures, and these were my favorites. I’m so grateful for digital!
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I went to the theater today to take pictures of the play they are working on – Enchanted April. It’s a very sweet little play about a couple ladies who run away for a vacation to Italy to get away from their dreary lives and husbands, and end up finding their way back to them.

Most of the people in the play are our friends or at least people we’ve worked with before. My hubby was in charge of the set building. The first act is pretty simple, and black curtains on the back wall hide the second act set – an Italian courtyard with columns, pergolas, flowers, and a lovely mural one of our talented artists painted. Dave and I spent a lot of time (ok, mostly Dave, but I helped a few days) getting those columns mounted securely. It’s nice to see it all done and being used.

I took pictures with my camera, but I’m still figuring it out, and I had some problems getting the exposure and color balance right. So I gave Dave my old camera to use and he took pictures at the same time. We ended up snapping about 1000 pictures between the two of us and whittled it down to under 200, and of those he only used about a dozen for the promo materials. Thank goodness for digital!

Dave has an upcoming play where he needed to have red hair, so he went ahead and had it colored – talk about a change! I should do a blog post of the ‘many faces of Dave’, he’s always changing his looks for whatever play he’s in!

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