Spot The Professional

It has started to happen again. My previous profession got me into trouble with the wife when we went to the movies - I would find myself concentrating so hard on the actor's teeth that I would lose the plot of the movie and have to plead for a summary. Mostly all I got was an elbow in the ribs.

Tonight I realised that my current work dooms me to watch the lighting instead of the entertainment. I attended a production of " South Pacific " and pretty soon I was calculating angles for the spots, watching the dimming and the gel changes, wondering about colour temperatures, and silently applauding the chap who designed the scheme as it presented the hero in chiseled majesty while the heroine was a classic soft Rembrandt.

I cannot remember a better stage lighting and I suspect that Perth may wait some time before it sees something as good. Perhaps the new Perth Arena will benefit from modern equipment - we should be alright if we can get inside of it without seeing the outside of it....

Come to think of it, the last really good stage lighting I saw in Perth was at the Bakery when they did a burlesque night. Laugh if you must, and that is the general idea, but the lighting cage was set out pretty well for the style of the show. Rest of the place looked like a pit, but it was a burlesque show and you didn't go there for interior decoration.

Lesson for photographers? Go to the stage shows and look. It is all happening in real time. No layers and gradients and the stage hands can't press command-Z to start the thing over again if it breaks down. So they are really doing pretty well. I was intrigued to see that there were no light bulb failures as well - those things are powerful and I wondered what they would do if something fused mid-show.

The only awkward part was I thought when they said South Pacific it would be sort of the battle of Midway and stuff like that and I went prepared. I had four clips of 40mm Bofors shells fused and ready to go and it turns out that it was just a bunch of singing and dancing and I didn't get to shoot Japanese airplanes or anything. I left them under the seat when I came home as they won't let you on the buses with them but somebody should have told me beforehand.