I spent the past weekend at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts working as part of the video crew for SYTE’s concert DVD production. I love shooting video but at the same time I often wish I could be shooting stills. I did manage to shoot some behind the scenes photos during my down time. It will give you a small glimpse of what happened before the show and a little taste of the excellent work by lighting designer Charles Griswold (though many of these shots were taken as lights were being set and were not the final lighting used in the show).

More pics after the jump…

Here is a short video clip from some footage I shot with the Nikon D90 during a rehearsal. I’ll be working one of the three video cameras for the live concert recording next week. I won’t be using the D90 for that though, I’ll be shooting a HVX200 with a P2 card.

The D90 is an interesting animal. You can get some really great looks from the camera and the right lenses but it is very limited. The 5 minute recording limit per clip is normally not a problem when you have a planned shoot, but for something that has to be shot in one take like this rehearsal, it gets to be a little annoying having to work around this. I was using it for about an hour and a half and it definitely was getting pretty hot, but still kept going.?The lack of manual controls is also something I just have to accept and try to make the best of.

I used a tripod and video head most of the time. The lighting levels were very low and came from available light through a bank of windows and tungsten room lights. Nothing fancy here…it was a rehearsal! I shot a gray card to get a color balance in camera and it did a very good job. For this video though, I wanted something a little edgier and played with the colors a little in Final Cut.

The sound from the little mono mic on the D90 is ok and useful for syncing but in a high sound pressure situation such as this rehearsal, it is unusable. Instead I used audio courtesy of a live recording by Darcel Walker who will be doing the sound recording for the concert video. He was using 4 wireless lav mics for this rehearsal. I didn’t process the audio at all and only gave a few tweaks to levels and panning.?

Whenever I look at this photo it kind of trips me out. It looks like a composite but it was shot in a single frame. I guess it’s all the black and side lighting. There were two lights used. One on the right side with an octobox and grid and one on the left with a medium strip and grid. Did I ever mention that I love grids? I’ll grid anything. Anyway, getting back to the pic. If I were to do this again, I think I might go with the composite method instead. Much easier to fine tune the lighting and would not take very long to assemble.

This one was all hot lights. On the left was a 250 watt Mole fresnel with a sheet of diffusion and on the right I used the modeling light from a gridded Dynalite head.