Some friends of mine (Elton Townend-Jones and Rebecca Vaughan) recently set up a theatre tours production company called Dyad Productions. Their new website can be found here
Last year Rebecca was touring in a show she wrote called ‘Austen’s Women’. She got top reviews at the Edinburgh Festival, appeared on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and ended up doing the show in London’s West End, Australia, and the US. I shot some extra last minute publicity stills for their production company. This year she asked me to do all the publicity shots for Dyad’s first production called: I, Elizabeth.
We did it on a shoestring budget with less than two hours to quickly shoot some images at Campus West in Welwyn. I was fascinated that three Elinchrom lights and just an old Nikon D70 (!) I bought along could deliver goods. There was no time to sort out details like hand positioning, the shape of the dress, and other specifics. We needed to knock off a lot of shots quickly – from several different positions – before the ‘curtain’ literally came down on us (the venue needed to put on a scheduled show on the stage we were using).
I hesitated putting these images up because of this, yet I was very happy with the results considering. Interesting that you can produce work under those circumstances, particularly with that type of camera. The colours went a bit wonky (the reds and some of the saturation) when I up-loaded these images to my blog (not sure why that happens?), yet I was pleased with the actual files (edited tiffs from RAW) given to the client. As a stark contrast, a week later, I was using the latest Leaf Aptus mk 2!
Three of the images we chose for Dyad’s marketing material:
I also really want to give a very big shout out to Dyad Productions in their first year…
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