Tableaux on the Shore

Leica M9 + Summarit 35mm f2.5

We are working on a tableaux project for which we are still hammering out the details as far as costumes, poses, etc., so we tried some possibilities today. The light wasn’t good, and it was mostly just for the staging.

While we would normally shoot these types of photos with a 50mm lens, this time we tried a 35mm. I thought that I might prefer it. But on seeing these, I do not. They look more wide-angley than I expected, and as a result the gestures come across even more caricature-like than they already are.

At some point we also tried using a 90mm, but those photos went in the opposite direction - compressing everything so that the gestures lacked expressiveness. So it seems the 50mm is indeed the happy medium and we should perhaps stick with that!