I own a Sony Mavica 95. If I want to take decent pictures of someone on a stage in a dark theater froma distance, how do I improve the quality of the shots and get a sharper image? Thank you.

-- Tony Hall (Thebtls@aol.com), June 23, 2000

Answers

Tony
While you say it is a dark theater is it a dark stage too? Even though you are surrounded by darkness the stage itself is often lighted quite brightly - enough so that you can use pretty normal settings. But even with all that light you need to be careful because stage light is often colored so it is neither daylight, nor tungsten equivelent. It can get worse because parts of the scene will be gelled for widely varying color temperatures to give the scene depth and interest.
Now you can see that shooting pictures from a stage - especially during a live performance - can be a real challenge. This is why most theaters have special "photo sessions" where they turn up all the lights and give the photographer time to make all of the necessary settings.
My advice: See if you can set up a tripod somewhere unobtrusive. Use the camera's automatic white ballance setting (but still plan to make adjustments in software) and shoot lots and lots of pictures.
Just an esthetic note: you probably don't want completely natural color of many live stage performance pictures - tends to make it look less like a stage performance and more like High School yearbook pictures. Allow the color variations within the lighting to be visible in the picture(s) and on the subject. Just because an image is blurry don't discount it. If it's just plain out of focus that's one thing (bad thing) but if the blurriness is from - and suggest motion in the subject, that can often enhance the imagery of what you have captured and the essence of the scene.
As for focus - one nice thing about a stage is that most everything takes place within a narrow plane of focus - I'd use the manual setting and let it be.

Des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), June 24, 2000.