Klyment.com - Journal

June 15-25 Rapid Fire Theatre hosts teams from around the world in Improvaganza 2005 - Canada's largest improvisional theatre festival. The shows all happen at the Varscona Theatre located at 10329 83rd Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta. For more details please visit this site. Most shows start at 8pm and regularly scheduled Rapid Fire Theatre shows have been converted to Improvaganza shows as well.

I will be covering most of the ten days of what has, at least so far, has already proven to be a series of extraordinary, non-scripted performances. Here are some of my favourite photos from opening night. All photos were taken with a Nikon D2X w/ a Nikon 17-55/2.8 AF-S DX ED lens shot hand held in RAW with existing light.

Yann, a Belgian improviser enjoying a Kokanee. ISO 800, F/2.8, 55mm, 1/100s

Chris, did you just pinch my ass? 35mm, F/2.8, 1/30s, ISO 800.

European connection. 19mm, F/2.8, 1/20s, ISO 3200. I understand that ISO 3200 images are of special interest to some prospective Nikon D2X purchasers so if there's an ISO 3200 raw file you'd like to play with please e-mail me.

Oops . . . did I get in your shot? 17mm, F/2.8, 1/20, ISO 1600.

Joel - most awesome improv sound dude ever. 38mm, F/2.8, 1/2s, ISO 3200. I know there's a blue cast - there was a blue gel over a fluorescent light so there wasn't a lot of colour information to pull out of the NEF.

Upstanding, one of the two Toronto teams. Kevin (left) is formerly of RFT. 38mm, F/2.8, 1/90s, ISO 800.

Chris Craddock, a very sickly-looking Jacob Banigan, and Mark Meer. When converting these photos from RAW I found that Mark's skin tone was always green cast when I managed to neutralize most of the other players' skin tones. I'll follow up on this skin tone issue in a later entry. Jacob just returned from Austria, Chris and Mark are RFT residents. 28mm, F/4.0, 1/125s, ISO 800.

I have no idea what the hell this part was about but the shot looked pretty cool so . . . 38mm, F/2.8, 1/160s, ISO 800.

Julian suckling on "The Magic Cow" with a hand from one of the players from Oregon as "The Twins" (both of them!) and Mark as "The Handsome Nurse" doubling as an udder. 44mm, F/2.8, 1/320s, ISO 800.

A HUGE thank you and acknowledgement to all of the people back stage and in the light and sound booth. The lighting on Wednesday made my job as a photographer so much easier as you can see from the shutter speeds achieved for many of the shots. When I shot one night of Chimprov last year with the Fuji Finepix S2 Pro, I was shooting everything at ISO 1600, F/2.8 and I was still getting shutter speeds of 1/30s and below.

All images were processed with Pixmantec's incredible and FREE raw workflow software Rawshooter Essentials 2005. D2X NEF support is still in a version 1.00 release but as you can tell the results are more than usable and I've experienced a huge improvement in workflow throughput with the software. When you're finally tired of unbearably sluggish performance with Nikon Capture even on computers with 4gigs of RAM and 3GHz+ processors it may be time to check out Rawshooter.