Shooting Stars
Bruce Raby of Perth, Ont., uses his talent as a photographer to capture the actors and the action at a local community theatre
Capturing the actors in action is just one of the contributions photographer Bruce Raby of Perth, Ont., makes to his local community theatre.
This year, Perth, Ont., celebrates the 200th anniversary of its founding. Initially a military settlement, by the mid 1800s “Perthites” were being entertained by concerts, operas and musicals. In 1915, the 1,000-seat Balderson Theatre opened in downtown Perth. It was described as the largest theatre between Montreal and Toronto, an opulent building that could rival the Royal Alexander Theatre in Toronto. How a town of less than 5,000 residents could support such a theatre is hard to understand—but it did. And for some 40 years, the theatre put on vaudeville acts, live theatre, musical extravaganzas and ultimately, movies. With the arrival of TV, the theatre finally closed its doors in 1958.
Fast forward 40 years or so and community theatre is once again back in Perth, but on a much smaller scale. Currently there are three theatres in Perth competing for the same entertainment dollars, and the area is home to many people involved with the visual and the performing arts.
The Perth Theatre Project was founded in 1992 as a charitable organization, with Studio Theatre Perth as the production arm for the theatre. The original plans called for a 700-seat theatre. Necessity forced it to become a much smaller 200-seat theatre, located on a second floor addition to an existing historic building in downtown Perth.
As an amateur photographer, I initially tended to shoot nature photos, but after taking photography courses at Algonquin College, I became interested in the world of portraiture—not formal shots, more like street photography and pictures that are not posed. Around the same time, I began volunteering at Studio Theatre Perth, building and painting sets. One day I offered to shoot the portrait shots of the actors in the current play. The fee for my photographic services was right—free! I was certainly nervous at first, but I got through that first shoot doing my very best to at least look like I knew what I was doing. It has been onward and upward ever since, a wonderful learning experience and a very personally satisfying photographic journey.
I soon discovered that the theatre is a marvelous place to develop photography skills. The theatre uses different types of images for a variety of applications. For example, I was asked to shoot the exterior of the theatre for the website, but remove the stains and dirt that had accumulated on the exterior stucco from the photo itself. There are the typical portrait shots and of course there are the rehearsal shots. These images are shot under varied and changing lighting conditions, changing backgrounds as sets are being built and painted, and different attire worn by the actors between the regular street clothes of early rehearsals and the full costumes of dress rehearsals. There are also miscellaneous shots for various public relations events.
I typically shoot more than 500 images for a play, mostly portrait and rehearsal shots for programs as well as for marketing and pro- motion purposes. Image composition and lighting are the two main ingredients that I’m looking for in rehearsal shots. These shots are the most interesting as well as the most challenging to do. They also offer the best opportunity for creating what I like to call photo art.
Early rehearsals can be very much stop-and-go affairs, as the director and actors work out positions on the stage, movements and exits and entries. Gradually the play begins to take shape. After I attend a number of rehearsals, I know exactly when a particular scene will be coming up and what the shot will look like. At early rehearsals before the set is finished, I like to get in close, focusing on the actors and capturing emotion, facial expressions and motion in my images.
One of the things that you quickly discover in shooting images in the theatre is that the final performance goes with mili-
tary precision. The actors’ movements, cues, words and music are all coordinated with amazing accuracy. By dress rehearsal time, I know the shots I want, the angle and position in the theatre from which to take each shot and the camera settings I will use. We have a raised stage, meaning that the stage is about three feet off the floor. I move around in the theatre looking for the best combination of image composition and lighting. I often use a stepladder to get enough elevation so that my lens is about eye level with the actors. I rarely shoot these shots on stage, as it’s far too disruptive to the rehearsal process, unless of course it is a posed image.
Lighting is one of the biggest challenges for a photographer shooting in the theatre. Studio Theatre Perth has a relatively simple lighting system that is not optimized for photography.
During my brief career as an
amateur photographer, there are a few things that have guided my development. The first and perhaps easiest to understand is, if you take enough pictures, you’re bound to get a good one. The next one is, if you’re not happy with your images, move closer. I heard this somewhere from a real photographer, and it has been especially valuable to me in the theatre. Moving in close allows me to capture that brief moment of tender emotion, passion, rage or movement. I am less concerned about things like focus. I can live with parts of an image being out of focus; in fact, I often deliberately throw the backgrounds out of focus in these images, drawing the viewer to just what I want them to see. The final one is, less is more. This I discovered from a local artist. As I try to apply it to photography, I like to keep backgrounds to a minimum. This is perhaps easiest to do in early rehearsals before the sets are finished. In some cases, I even remove items from the image that are distracting or unnecessary for the feeling that I want the viewer to experience. It’s also easy to do with posed shots that can be done with a black stage curtain as the background. This really focuses viewer attention on the actors, who are always the central point of the image.
I feel a certain obligation to shoot the very best images that I can. The amount of effort that the actors and other volunteers freely contribute to put on each play amounts to hundreds and hundreds of hours. The actors and many of the stage crew never actually get to see the play, except through the images I shoot. I get to create images that themselves can be a wonderful piece of photo art, especially in black and white— images of which I’m proud to say, “I shot that in the theatre!”
I’m not a touchy-feely type of person, so trying to capture the human side of a story in writing is a real challenge, but I also know that’s one of the reasons I like volunteering at the theatre. Most of the people there are so extroverted and people-centric, it really is a different world for me and I love it! Although it’s not always easy to fit in or describe that world in words, I seem to have found a way to do it through the sets I paint and especially via the images I capture. n