Tuesday 18 May 2010

Music in the Round returns to the Crucible Studio

I've long appreciated the challenge of photographing chamber music concerts.  Normally, of course, this is forbidden, because it can disturb the audience, quite apart from the ban routinely imposed by venues.  Last week I was invited to shoot the final concert of Music in the Round's annual May Festival.   This event was significant for two reasons: it was Peter Cropper's last Festival before retiring as Artistic Director, and the first Festival back in the Crucible Studio after reburbishment.

The musicians say that performing in the round, in the unforgivingly precise accoustic of the Studio, is initially terrifying but ultimately exciting and uniquely rewarding.  Peter Cropper's vision has brought us a special immediacy of rapport between audience and players. It is this that I have tried to capture in these images.

It's essential to use a silent (mirrorless) camera and to be positioned unobtrusively rather than in the thick of the audience.  This was the first major outing for my Canon G11 compact camera.  It coped reasonably well at ISO 400 but images made at ISO 800 to reduce subject movement blur were rather more compromised.  This first image shows the expectant audience:





The most challenging images were those showing both performers and audience when the house lights were down -- the small sensor's dynamic range is scarcely up to this.  Of course, you can't combine images of moving subjects to extend this range, but blending multiple RAW "exposures" or localised Photoshop levels and curves adjustments improved matters somewhat:





My favorite shot of the night shows the flourish of string players' bows in the instant following the very last note of the final piece of the Festival, Schubert's monumental Octet:





Peter Cropper, delayed in France by volcanic ash, arrived too late to perform in the concert.  He just made it in time to receive the appreciation of the audience at the end of the evening:





This outing confirms Canon's wisdom in reducing the pixel density of the G11 as compared with the G10.  It also confirms the benefit of Canon's restoration of the swivelling LCD screen, last seen on the G6.  In terms of image quality, the G11 is a great improvement on the G6, which I sold to help finance the G11. I'm glad not to have invested in any of the intervening G series cameras!

More images are posted on my website.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi David,

Some great work here. Not bad for a compact camera. I particularly like the florish of volins. Well done in a challenging environment.

David Shapiro said...

Hi Malcolm

Thanks for the commment.

Musing on possible improvements on the compact camera for silent in-concert work, I wonder if a fixed-lens APS-C camera might be almost as quiet as the G11. Presumably the interchangeable-lens mirrorless hybrids have noisy focal-plane shutters. When you reviewed one of the Sigma DP series cameras, did you notice how loud the shutter was?