Gorgeous Avatar by Jules Horne

Photo Finish - Douglas Robertson

Douglas Robertson
Photographer

Just to give the actors teensy wee extra challenge, the dress rehearsal saw a man with a mighty lens leaping about, doing his best to put them off their lines. This turned out to be Douglas Robertson, production photographer and veteran of many a Traverse show. After he'd taken the allegedly obligatory writer's photo, I got my revenge by pointing the trusty blog mic...

Douglas: I photograph the production shots, so I've been in today shooting the entire dress rehearsal. That's generally how it has to be - you can't photograph a show when the audience is in. People complain!

How do you prepare for a theatre shoot?
In the case of the Traverse, I prepare for it by seeing a previous run of the show, but in most cases that isn't possible, so I just bring my entire camera bag with me, and then I've got everything that I could possibly need to photograph a show. And a good night's sleep the night before! And a cup of coffee...

There must be particular challenges with theatre lighting..?
You deal with it as best you can. Theatre lighting tends to be heavily filtered, and tends very often to be very low levels. The old days of theatre, where the lights come on and you're dazzled by glare seem to be long over. A lot of directors and lighting designers like to have moody lighting, which makes the photographer's job a nightmare. You can't even use a tripod, because although the camera's steady, you're not photographing a still object, so the people move around. So you just have to use the fastest film or the fastest setting on your digital camera that you can get, and the best lenses, and pray that's it's going to work.

What productions have you photographed for the Traverse over the years?
I don't know how many years I've been doing the Traverse now. The People Next Door [by Henry Adams] was a great show. Really entertaining. The problem is that I photograph them, and very often that means I don't actually see the show. People ask me what it was like, and I can't honestly tell them. I can tell them what the lighting levels were like! Where possible, I try and see the show afterwards. There have been some great ones - Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way was a fabulous show. That was a real highlight. Good to photograph and fabulous to go and watch.

Any particular images that you've loved?
One that Una McLean was in: Shimmer [by Linda McLean]. They're both in raincoats. That was a lovely image - a very dramatic image. But there have been so many, it's hard to pull them out. Again, Gagarin Way: a couple of scenes when everything goes still and there's a spotlight on one character, really powerful. Very dramatic writing, powerful piece of theatre.

And how was it to photograph Gorgeous Avatar?
When I watched the show the first time I was sitting there very nervous, because I was worried that the whole show was going to be so heavily filtered. You know the scenes where there's intense yellow light or intense red light? There's no camera that can cope with that. It's already tungsten lighting, which is very hot, and then when you put filters onto it, it goes way beyond the scale. It's like the equivalent of trying to hear what dogs can hear, you just can't do it. But fortunately the second half is less heavily filtered, and I think maybe they toned it down a little for the show. So I should have some decent pictures - at least one!

posted by Jules Horne @ 5/05/2006 05:29:00 PM