After photographing Andre’s house for Jeb, Fontaine mentioned to me that her dance company was putting on a production of the Christmas Carol, combining both her dancers and a theater company. As a young girl I danced in several school productions and memories started to well…dance in my head. I offered to take shots at one of their dress rehearsals. We got shots individually of all the cast members who were there that day on a gold backdrop I brought with me. I had forgotten that so many beautiful ballet poses involve the ballerina’s hands en haut, or above their heads, and my backdrop wasn’t very tall. Consequently photoshop had to play a much larger roll in my post processing than normal, since I had to manufacture more backdrop behind the performers.
The lovely Joppa Dance members were very willing posers, some even gave me their very best blue steel impressions. Shooting during the performance allowed me to really test the impressive high ISO settings on my 5DmkII since the lighting matched the color of old Ebinezer Scrooge’s heart, fairly dark, and for safety reasons it is best not to use flash during a performance. I was pleased with the overall lack of noise produced in the images resulting from these high settings that I would normally never use at a wedding. Bravo Canon…Bravo.
In the end the production was wonderful, and really was a great start to my holiday season. If they do the show again in 2011 at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport, you should definitely see it! Below are just a few of the images from that evening dress rehearsal. To see the rest of the images from the shoot visit our online proofing site.
