[Leica] Theater Photography

[Paul and Paula Butzi <butzi@halcyon.com>]

I suspect that there is a vast pool of expertise out there in LUG-land
that is untapped, and I'm hoping to tap it.

One of the things I've been using Leica M equipment for is theater
photography.   More specifically, I've been (with the help of a couple
of friends) providing photographs for the student productions at the
school my daughter attends - we make photographs of the production
(and the production staff) during one or two dress rehearsals, and then
go home, process all the film, edit the photographs down to a selection,
and I print 11x14's (image size of 9x13.5 or so), give them to the
folks at the school, and they hang them in the lobby before the
performance.  Last time I gave them fourteen prints.

We've been using TMax 3200-P (TMZ) which I've been rating at 800.
After a bit of fiddling, we seem to have exposure and contrast under
control.  For the last show, we ended up exposing about twelve rolls 
of 36 exposures.

I can run the film 8 rolls at a time in my Jobo, so processing the film
is a snap.

My biggest difficulty is editing the selection down from the hundreds
of frames that we expose down to the dozen images I print and give
the school.

The first time, I had about twenty rolls of film, and edited the negatives
on a light box.  After that, I finally got around to contact printing them all
and concluded that I should have contact proofed them before editing.
I cranked out 8x10 prints of the promising images, sorted through those, 
and selected half a dozen images that I printed 11x14, then delivered 
the whole pile.  Printing was a monumental task.

I had a couple of days to print, so this worked out ok, but it was clearly
not optimal, since after contact printing, I realized that in some cases
I had missed some really nice images.  Ok, I chalked that up as a learning
experience.

Last time, I contact proofed all 12 rolls, and we edited from the contact
prints.  The turnaround time in this case was much shorter (shoot on
Wed, deliver prints on Friday).  Still it took a bit of time.

Could some of the folk out there who regularly edit large quantities of
images give me some tips?

And, of course, I'm open to tips/pointers on theater photography in
general.  If someone wants a brain dump of what I've learned so far,
you need only ask.  

- -Paul