This weekend I was tasked with shooting a symphony orchestra for a recording session in Seattle’s Studio X. My clients were the people hiring the players, so I didn’t have carte blanche with how I wanted to execute a lighting scheme or capturing performances. In fact, I couldn’t even take a shot while the musicians were performing since shutter clicks and strobes popping would make it into all of those fantastic old Neumann microphones. So instead I would grab what I could during the lulls between recording passes.
The lighting scheme consisted of Nikon SB shoe-mounted strobes at each end of the room with full CTO gels to bounce off of the large, white walls and one mounted near the ceiling behind the conductor with a Justin Clamp and a 1/2 CTO gel for a different zone of color. The CTO business is all moot since these ultimately wound up black and white, but I was balancing my strobes with the available tungsten light. To read more about the concept of gelling your lights to balance color, head on over to Strobist and read this article.
The other shots were taken with available light in the control room using a 50mm f/1.4. I love shallow depth of field when making these types of shots.
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January 31st, 2008 at 9:27 am
[…] back I posted some images about shooting a symphony at Seattle’s Studio X. The project that the recording was for is about to go on-air Monday, […]