Pics from an amateur theatre production

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.  It's an OK picture but really nothing special.  Again, moving closer or zooming closer in would really help it.

 

This picture is problematic for a number of reasons, all due to my bad positioning.  The dark trousers and shoes fade into the dark background and the difference in lighting behind the subject's right & left misleads your eyes.  There's a lot of noise to the right of the subject because the lighting has bled into the stage left area.

It could be cropped to remove the dark trousers but it doesn't fix the biggest problem of the light & dark background, and the noisey dark.  If I were to take this again I would be closer to the subject's front, and aim to include only the lighter areas of the subject.

Essentially this post seems to come down to me saying that positioning is important.  It is really important!  It is not possible (or at least, it's much more difficult) to get a good shot from a poor position.  Planning helps, if you can scope out where your subjects will be you can plan where you can get your best shots.