Dreaming of New Sources
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pavilion Theatre, Penn State University, Dec. 2021.
In December, we re-opened our Pavilion Theatre, a 200-seat ¾-thrust space that’s been largely dormant for the past 3 years. There were a number of renovation plans underway, coupled with COVID, which kept us from using the space for live performance for a while. I was lucky enough, however, to use the space last year as my light lab, since my regular lab was deemed to be too small for the needed ‘social-distancing’. One of the main renovations involved retiring the aged (some might say ancient) collection of incandescent fixtures in the space, and replacing the entire inventory with ETC ColorSource fixtures. We were able to leverage some carefully-prepared electrical studies on the power usage in the space, in order to get a nice chunk of money from the Office of Physical Plant. You may find this incredible, but some of the fixtures were Kliegl Model #1491s! For those younger readers...let’s just say they were realllllyyyyy old lights.
Fast-forward to modern times, and we mounted a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a fully-LED rig, although there were a few hanging incandescent bulbs that were part of the scenic design. Due to a chain of circumstances, I ended up stepping in to design the show a few weeks before the plot was due, and brought one of my students, Riley Allsop, in as an Associate LD. Good thing too, since I had to isolate for a few days, and basically turned the show over to Riley at that point! I’ve used LEDs for a while now, and have used various types of color-changing fixtures since the start of my career, but this was the first time that every single light in the rig was a color-changer. This fundamentally changed how we approached building cues and talking to the programmer. It also meant that there wasn’t a single white balance ‘reference fixture’ anywhere. For decades, it’s been easy to set up for shooting with incandescent light, by either purchasing tungsten-balanced film, or setting the DLSR to 3200°K. With many mixed rigs, I’ve still set up with the mindset that I’m making my color choices based on 35+ years of having my eye calibrated to that lovely warm light we have all been so used to.
Generally speaking, this has worked pretty well for me, but I was starting to experiment with adjusting the color temperature up to 4000°K or 4600°K on a few test runs on other shows. I’m ambivalent about the results, so I went back to 3200°K for this shoot on my Nikon D200. I also recently acquired a Sony ɑ6000 mirrorless digital camera, so that I can experiment with the differences between the two architectures. The Sony isn’t as refined as the Nikon (consumer grade vs. ‘pro-sumer’ grade), so I didn’t have as much detailed control over color temperature/white balance settings. I selected the “cool white fluorescent” option, which is probably somewhere around 5600°K. I decided to shoot this photocall using the D200 DSLR, the ɑ6000 mirrorless, and one of my trusty old Nikon F2T’s loaded with some legacy Ektachrome 320 slide film. It’s been kept cool all these years, although it’s definitely ‘expired’, so unsure what I’ll get out of it. The only special adjustment I made (or could make) was pushing the film one stop by setting the ASA/ISO to 640 instead of 320. Once I find somewhere to process the film with the one-stop push, I’ll post comparison shots from the three cameras.