Experiments in Geekery

These are the first set of pictures I took in the theatre environment, and below are some of the pics that well... didn't work so well with a couple of reasons why I think they're poor, and what I would do to improve them. The first example shot is taken of stage right, lit by spotlight.  You can immediately see that the lighting conditions aren't ideal; we've got a lot of light where there shouldn't be light (e.g. shining off the chair backs to the left, the stairs in front of the stage and the poster on the wall to the left), and a good cropping would probably do this picture a favour.  An easy way to improve this would be to take it with a closer zoom around the subjects, or simply to move closer.  Perhaps increasing the aperture and reducing exposure time would help? This is essentially a slightly tighter version of the picture above.  It's been cropped and at larger sizes is really grainy, more-so than I would have expected for the ISO being set to 400. 

I have a bit of a experience doing theatre photography in a very amateur environment. I'm a member of Oswestry Musical Theatre Company and have got some great pictures of our shows during dress/technical rehearsals (see photos from our "The Secret Garden" performance ), but some good photos from a professional show would just be a great experience. There is an definite skill to taking good photos in a theatre environment! I was in the Apollo Victoria theatre recently watching Wicked. As I was watching i was bemoaning the fact that we had wonderful seats and a great view, but couldn't do anything about taking photos. As I watched the show unfold, too many beautiful potential shots passed me by and I couldn't resist any more. My camera was easily accessible and is always set to use no flash anyhow. I got these shots from row B, right hand side of the seating (to stage left) The camera was set to use the centre (spot) of the image as the light meter, ISO 400, auto