The Man of La Mancha Concert

The Napa Valley College Performing Arts Theatre had its inaugural performance last weekend with a concert version of The Man of La Mancha by Wasserman, Leigh, and Darien. It was also the first performance shot with my new camera, the Canon ESO-1D Mark IV.

 

The new theater space is grand, here in a panorama shot from the top seating. I pieced these together from three hand-held shots using manual exposure settings. Settings: 18mm, 1/20 sec, f/5.6, Mode: Manual, Metering: Center-weighted average, ISO: 2000, Flash: Off. I used Photoshop Merge, but had to attach the right-most image manually since the image was tilted a bit. The space is grand.
Next, I wandered backstage to gaze up at the 65 ft fly space. It was too dark to see the ceiling, so it was an opportune time to try the camera’s very high ISO. Here’s the hand-held result:

Settings:24mm, 1/8 sec, f/3.2, Mode: Av, Metering: Multi-segment, Exp comp: -1, ISO: 12800, Flash: Off.

 

Settings: 24mm, 1/100 sec, f/4, Mode: Av, Metering: Multi-segment, Exp comp: -2 2/3, ISO: 800.

Above is a wide-angle shot from the back of the theater, about 75 feet back. Below are a few shots from the back of the theater with the telephoto lens. I’ve never been able to crop such high-resolution images from a telephoto shot before.

Since the singers were in front of the orchestra, I wanted as narrow a depth of field as possible to make the foreground stand out in sharp focus, so I used f/3.2 to f/2.8 as often as possible when zoomed in. For the wide-angle shot above, I used f/4.0.

To show the audience, I took two Av shots from the side balcony, one with the exposure set by focusing on the stage, and one with the focus set on the audience, all with the f-stop at f/4.5. At home, I used Photoshop to layer the two partial images together. It’s not perfect, but it does give a representation of dynamic range the eye sees from that vantage point.

The performance was excellent, and rewarded with a standing ovation.