“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd
His skin was pale and his eye was odd
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were heard of again
He trod a path that few have trod
Did Sweeney Todd
The demon barber of Fleet Street”

Last week I shot the Dress Rehearsal for one of my all time favorite musicals - Sweeney Todd. The Youth Arts Ambassadors group put on a great show as usual. This was the “School Edition” of Sweeney but if they cut anything out of the original I didn’t notice it at all. There was still plenty of cursing, coveting, and murdering.

For this show I changed my shooting tactics to better take advantage of some fast motion that I knew was going to be occurring. Typically I shoot Aperture Priority with Auto ISO on, and set my minimum shutter speed to somewhere around 1/250th. This usually allows for me to not have to think about changing anything during the event, and it works for about 95% of what’s usually going on. Where it sometimes fails is where there is some FAST action, and also if there are very still moments that I could shoot at a much slower shutter speed to keep the noise down in the images. So for this event, I changed my style to shoot in Manual mode with Auto ISO. This meant that for action sequences I can quickly ramp up the shutter speed on demand, and by the same token really slow it down if there isn’t any action. Of course, this puts more burden on me to ensure I am not caught off-guard trying to shoot action and accidentally leaving the shutter speed on a slow setting.

This change worked like a charm, and allowed me to maximize the quality of my output for the performance. For example, the image below was during a lull in the action and I was able to drop the shutter speed down to around 1/60th to get a clean, lower noise image.

And then when things were moving fast, like when Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett were dancing to “A Little Priest”, I bumped the shutter up to 1/500th to freeze the action - and thank goodness for good lighting.

The fog machine was in full-on mode for this one, which typically adds quite a bit of drama to the lighting. For the most part it was great, but there were a few times where it hurt critical sharpness - especially when the actors were further back in the set and there was a decent amount of fog in the atmosphere between me and them. In those situations I just went with it, embracing the moodiness that it created.

I’ve written in the past about how AI has helped with editing my bird photography, and I also now use it quite a bit with theater photography as well. The Generative AI Fill feature is a life saver. For this show, there was not a live orchestra so there was no “pit”, but there was a smaller area in the front where Bailey sat controlling the sound and lighting. Below is a before and after showing how AI helped this situation in many of my images. Click to open in a larger window.

OK, enough babbling on about technique and stuff. Below are some of my favorites from the shoot. Click on the first one to view larger and scroll through.

Shooting this show was so much fun, and it shows in the images.

Krissy, the Executive Director for YAA always says that I make her kids “feel like rockstars” when I shoot their events. Its a flattering compliment, but when the kids talk about how much they love me shooting the events for them, I always like to say “All I do is show up and push the button”.

As always, thanks for reading.

Jeremy

PS: If you are or know a theater organization that is looking for a photographer for the upcoming 2025 season, please reach out to me. My calendar is filling up fast.