One of the most challenging things for photographers to photograph is large groups.

Communication is key to getting the best photo where you can see everyone’s face.

One of the best possible solutions is risers. They are often called CHORAL RISERS.

Even using these risers doesn’t solve the problems with people’s heads blocking the people behind them in a photo.

No matter how often I work to get things just right, there are always a couple of folks who move and think they are OK from their perspective.

The two guys on the back row here think they are OK since they can “see” me. It would help if you had each row create enough space between people that the distance between their heads creates a “Window” space for the people in the row behind them to stand.

Staggering people works, but telling the people on a row to help create a “Window” and have the 2nd row put their heads into those “Windows” can speed up lining people up for a group photo.

If you don’t have risers, create more space between people.

I discovered that while I was overseas for three trips this year, I wasn’t covered if my gear was lost, stolen, or damaged. I thought I had done everything right. I even wrote about it on this blog on how I screwed up.

August 1, 2012 I wrote this in my blog: [Camera Insurance]

Lesson Learned

A few years ago, I read on a photography forum how people were getting great deals through their State Farm Insurance representative. I was with State Farm for my house and cars then, so I called them.

I explained that I do not have a studio, do location work all over the country, and occasionally overseas travel.  I got a quote for about 1/3 of what I had been paying. I jumped on that and had the policy for more than two years.

Just change that “State Farm Insurance” to “Allstate Insurance.” The difference in how I got burned this time was that ASMP had listed them as a benefit.

Howard Burkholtz was the representative that I talked with about switching from Tom C. Pickard & Co.

I explained that I travel and do not work out of a brick-and-mortar business. I travel to my clients all over the world.

How it all went wrong

While in Trinidad teaching in the Storytellers Abroad workshop, I got up from my chair, and my foot caught the power cord plugged into HyperDrive – USB Type-C Hub, which also my 4TB Western Digital Hard drive was plugged into. The hard drive went crashing to the floor.

Not everything on the drive was there a second copy of the files. I sent it off to get recovered. I knew that the insurance was supposed to cover this.

Well, I read in the policy they sent me to sign that the limit was $10,000 for data recovery. When I talked to the claims adjuster, they informed me it was only for $5,000.

I discovered that I wasn’t covered as told by the Allstate Representative.

When I just left my house, I was covered only by about 1/2 of the policy I had before. I also discovered that I was not covered at the requested replacement cost.

The worst thing is that I discovered that my camera gear was not covered overseas. I made three trips this year to Peru, Trinidad, and Chile. Had anything been damaged or stolen, I wasn’t covered.

So my coverage with Tom C. Pickard & Co. was around $800 a year. Allstate was initially quoting about $350. When they saw I also did a video that went up to $500.

Howard Burkholtz discovered the problem and was willing to find another policy to cover me as requested. He came back with a price of $1,800.

I canceled their policy and called Tom C. Pickard and company (http://www.tcpinsurance.com/). Allstate refunded me, and the new policy is right back to about $800 a year for all my $45,000 gear.

I learned even the insurance recommended by a professional association like ASMP could be bad for you. I recommend talking to other pros doing similar work as you and finding out what they are using.

Where there is no guidance, people fall, but there is safety in an abundance of counselors.

Proverbs 11:14

One of the most challenging things I struggle with regarding my clients is wanting to help them, but I am not invited to the table.

I have learned from my 35+ years in the industry that I have what my friend calls “accumulated scar tissue.” I have seen so many things and been in so many planning meetings that I am bringing all of this to the table when I listen to your ideas.

Just on Facebook the other day, a photographer went to an event where they had the podium in front of a window. This makes it nearly impossible to get a good photo/video of the person on the stage. This is an excellent example that someone could have spoken into the planning that has the expertise of why you are doing the event – for media coverage.

Most of the time, people will not invite you in and hold a meeting to listen to you. They are not even going to invite you to the room.

They often fear that you may only give them suggestions that benefit you and not the organization. Even if you have built a reputation for giving them advice that doesn’t help you and them, they are still so cautious they are missing out on some counsel.

How to be present when the client isn’t showing interest

Be available – Do everything you can reasonably do without being a stalker to show you are there for them. Just check in with them. Be Supportive – You are not asking for work; you genuinely offer to help in any way possible.

Be Organic – Imagine allowing things to happen naturally, and things work out, and all you did was smile and watch. To do this, you must know what you can do. You let what is going to happen, happen. Accept the outcome, good or bad. Always try and learn from the situation. If you have this attitude, when your client talks about something they are working on, you will have the perfect opportunity to offer counsel.

Do your research – Nothing is worse than having an opportunity drop in your lap and ruin it. Those opportunities come seldom, so do your homework. This is very hard to do if no one lets you know what they are working on. This is like how the US monitors North Korea; they must ask China, Japan, and South Korea to give them intel.

Model the behavior – Have you ever noticed that you want your client to open up so you can help, but you haven’t opened up for others to help you? This is probably my weakest area myself. Find someone you can talk to to help you think better and develop the necessary patience.

Set Boundaries – Realize your limitations. Don’t become a pest. You don’t want to put pressure on them in any way. They should never feel pressured by you.

Don’t Avoid Them – This is strange that I should mention this, but sometimes we treat our clients like they have lost a loved one or have cancer. We don’t know what to say, so we withdraw from them. Amazingly just being there for someone can mean sitting in silence with them. Having answers and ideas all the time isn’t as valuable as just knowing when you don’t have an idea.

The photo above is from the photo call for Show Boat performance at East Carolina to open the new theater on April 3, 1982. The camera I shot that on was a Nikon FM2. I would have been using Kodak Tri-X film pushed to ISO 1600. The shutter speed would have been about 1/60 @ ƒ/2.8.

Everyone was in place and told to freeze. Notice how all the guy’s hats are in the same position. Would that happen in a natural scene? Why was this posed? In the 1980s, the film didn’t allow you to move much, or you were blurred.

Before writing this blog, I surveyed my professional photographer friends who shoot theater. No one doesn’t prefer shooting real-time action over staged moments.

The 1826 photo View from the Window at Le Gras took 8 hours to expose the first photograph ever shot. When Louis Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype in 1839, he managed to shave this time down to just 15 minutes.

Technology made it almost impossible to get action shots as they happen in a dress rehearsal or live theater.

I have been doing headshots for actors for 35+ years in this profession. Recently I tried to mix some real “Moments” into the photo shoots.

I asked the theater people to give me all their facial expressions in 30 seconds. Even if those photos taken during those 30 seconds didn’t turn out the best, the images that followed were far superior. The difference is going for a “real moment” and not a “posed one.”

Here is a blog post I did for actor headshots.

In 2017 I photographed my daughter’s high school production of Oklahoma and was shooting the live performance. Here I froze the peak moment when a dancer was doing a split. This was not possible in 1982.

Until the Nikon D3 was introduced in 2008, the maximum ISO sensitivity setting that you might be able to shoot at was either 1600 or 3200 (depending on the model), and even then, not remarkably confidently.

I jumped from shooting ISO 1600 to ISO 12800. This was three full stops of ISO.

Today I have the Nikon D5 & Nikon Z6 and have had to use ISO 51200 or higher to get photos. Before now, they were not possible without a flash.

Nan Melville, who shoots for The Juilliard School performances, says, “shooting in real-time in rehearsal is important – Instead of stopping and having the actors pose. I never do that.” [Nan Melville’s performing arts photos]

Alan Goldstein says, “I’ve photographed many performances and preferred dress rehearsal because I could move around the theatre. However, I have also photographed live performances from the rear of the theatre. Nothing was staged for me, and I liked the spontaneity.” [Alan Goldstein’s work]

Jeff Widner said he shot these of the broadway show “Network” during the performance. Go here to see those photos.

Michelle Heimlich says, “I know Ball State University that I shot for 15+ years ago with the move to digital photography, has gone to all real-time photography instead of dress rehearsals.”

Now when it comes to dancing, that takes things to a whole new level. If it were born in 1982 with my Nikon FM2, this photo would have been 1/2-second-long at ISO 1250 and ƒ/5.6. Also, that wouldn’t be in color. Back then, ISO for Color was about ISO 320. Your shutter speed would have been about 2 seconds.

Nan Melville says,

“With dance, I find it almost impossible to pose pix and can generally tell when I see a photo set up. Sometimes the set-up Photos with the elaborate background can be compelling, like the posters for ballet and opera, when done on a grand scale, if you know what I mean.

That is, with a setting and lights organized for a particular effect. However, these must be good, or I think they are fake.

A dancer recently asked me to take pictures during a performance because all the rehearsal pictures were so bad, and the absolute intensity did not show.”

Only recently has it been technically possible to capture the scene above that I did recently at the dress rehearsal for “She Kills Monsters.” ISO 51200 made this possible.

As you can see, the actors don’t have the emotion on their faces as they would have had during the actual scene. Stopping and posing make for poor aesthetic images.

It makes the actors look horrible. What I like about capturing a rehearsal and performance versus a photo call where we stop the scene for photos is that the emotions of the commission are lost.

Getting high school performers to look accurate in posed photos is nearly impossible. This is why I love shots like this of high school performance.

“Photography is not like painting,” Henry Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event and of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

Henry Cartier-Bresson

When theatre is done at its best, the storytelling becomes real and makes the audience feel. Their bodies will react to those scenes. Your body wants to run when the scary parts of the story are told and cries during the sad moment. You laugh at the times of humor.

Photography of the theatre should do the same. It should capture those peak moments and bring the audience into the moment. We kill the moment when we stop actors and tell them to hold a pose.

The TV Show “Lie to me!” is inspired by the work of Paul Ekman, the world’s foremost expert on facial expressions and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.

The research is based on the fact that people have micro-expressions that happen only at about 1/30 of a second. I know that many seasoned photographers can anticipate these types of moments. When you freeze actors, you will never capture these micro-expressions, which bring a level to the performance of a scene that is not possible without the actors in full performance mode.

With today’s camera, the technology allows us to capture theater and dance live, which was not possible just a few years ago. If you want to fill those seats in theaters with paying customers, the only thing that many will see that will determine if they come is the photos that promote the performance. It would help if you had the best possible “Moment” to enable it.

Hire a photographer known for capturing the “Moment” with the gear to photograph in low light to get the best possible images to promote your performance.

The photo above is of Brown Pelicans. The Brown Pelican is the only pelican that uses the plunge-dive while fishing. The bird flies some 20 or 30 feet above the water. [NIKON Z 6, Sigma VR Zoom 120-300mm f/2.8G IF-ED, Mode = Manual, ISO 800, 1/4000, ƒ/5.6, (35mm = 360)]

I love shooting with the Nikon Z6 camera during our family’s vacation at Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina.

Combining the Nikon Z6 with the Godox V860IIN flashes, I got some good group photos and portraits on the beach.

I love the ability to see what I am getting before shooting. Less chimping and checking the LCD. Also, using the Electronic View Finder, I can see what I am getting. While witnessing the histogram is always helpful, it is less necessary with the mirrorless than the DSLR.

I loved taking early morning walks each day carrying the Nikon Z6. I used the tilting LCD screen for this photo to get the camera low to the ground.

I enjoy the dynamic range that the camera is capturing as well.

I love being able to capture the family as well in candids.

I like how the face recognition and eye tracking function works.

All positives so far in using the camera during our family vacation.