Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Elusive Ear

I’ve done a lot of shoots and promotion photography for live theatre shows. One theory I have is that the photos being used to promote the show should communicate to the audience that the show is of a high quality with interesting costumes and set pieces.

I was contacted to do some promo shots for the Sullivan Theatre in Central, LA for “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Elusive Ear.” They wanted each character photo to look like they were portraits as well as doing some on-stage shots to show off the set pieces.

We went back and forth deciding if we wanted to have picture frames or just a portrait with a name plate. I decide to forgo the picture frames since they were too distracting and, at least for Instagram use, made the character a bit too small and harder to see.

Here are some shots from that shoot.

Some of the added effects to this was an aging process around the edges as if they were pulled from a photo album and a canvas print effect to give the illusion they were printed on a certain type of paper.

Lighting all the characters together were actually done individually at a time. Since the lighting wasn’t adequate for the entire cast across the entire stage, I mounted the camera to a tripod and went around capturing each character with a strobe light, compositing them together at the end.