Taking picutres at school play

Good stuff. If you go to the same venue, time after time, you get to know the lighting. This sort of thing would be impossible with an S-series cam, due to the slow aperture.

I recently went along to a local pantomime to take some photos at their dress rehearsal. It wasn't the first show I had ever taken photos of, but it was the first one where there was quite so much dry ice in evidence.

The key learning from that was "dry ice and a powerful flashgun do not work well together"

As a general rule - and there are always exceptions - I'd say that performers do not mind flash photos at a dress rehearsal. I say that as one who does perform in musicals when I get the chance.

However, flash does cause the pictures to lose much of their atmosphere by blowing away the work done by the lightig crew - I would recommend varying between flash photos where there is fast movement (eg dancers) and available light for more static scenes.

Some of my stage photos are online at http://www.flickr.com/​photos/atp -you may prefer to ignore the collections with large numbers of photos which are there only to provide access to large numbers of photos for company members. The sets with smaller numbers of pictures are where I have selected the decent ones.

I guess a final suggestion would be to take lots of pictures, and be ready to throw many of them away.

regards,
/alan

Alan, very nice. I'm inspired.

Many thanks!

regards,
/alan