We covered the rehearsal of the Upper Valley Connection Icicle Players Theater Camp’s production of “The Wizard of Oz” Tuesday.

A few things made this a difficult assignment. First, the rehearsal was in the cafeteria which is dark, dim and dull. Second, there were many, many distracting elements like chairs, tables, etc… and third, the organizers thought it would be better to have everyone in funny hats for the pictures.

As for the third problem, at the Wenatchee World, we shoot photographs documentary style - no set up pictures please, try to act and do things just as we aren’t there. When people (I know they are trying to help) change things around just for the photograph, we have to do our best to avoid. So I had some nice, but unusable images of hats.

Eventually the hats came off and I could get down to working around the other two problems.

To shoot in the dark, I had to bump up the ISO to 1600 (using a computer program later to diminish the grain problem). And to avoid the distractions in the background, I shot from a chair, the high angle taking out the distractions.

And I shot with a telephoto, the distractions going blurry in the background.