Larry, I think you did a very reasonable job from the technical point of view, although I am not a specialist on studio shots. I don't see any sharp shadows on the floor or background, which is nice. Some photos have shadows that might be a bit deeper than one might desire, - but these shadows are from the face or mutual dancer position. (52300, 52313)
>From the "artistic" or rather dance point of view, - I'd argue that in several photos it is a problem of the dancers and the fact that you caught them in a pose that they cannot do well. This is one of the points I make in my "Dancers and Photographs" workshops in regard to what is important for the dancers to look well in the photos: posture, lines (poses) and transitions between poses. In this series, some of them have clearly broken lines. It could be them not making the line, or you, not catching them. Here is one of the examples I make in my workshop: Yes: http://42graphy.org/tango/show-2007/content/IMGP0389_large.html No: http://www.komkon.org/~igor/PHOTOS/Rejects/IMGP0390-Edit.jpg I hope this illustrates some aspects of what I am talking about. In general, the better the dancers, the more great shot opportunities you get. However, there are exceptions. I analyzed shots made from performances done by the instructors at a recent tango festival. I took about 60-100 shots per dance per couple, with about the same level of effort of catching the best shots. For one couple (with a very famous dancer), I can barely find 2-3 shots with reasonable lines, while for another (much less famous), that percentage was way over 30-50% with the same level of critical judgement. For the latter couple it was easy even to find several sequences of 5-10 shots taken within 10-15-second interval with all good lines. (So that they can be put together in a short cartoon sequence.) Another point regarding the poses (lines): some of the poses in your series look frozen, and hence somewhat unnatural (as in posed). That's a big point that I mention in my workshop: in many cases the poses should not be frozen, they should be dynamic, even if the dynamics is very slow (it is especially important in tango, where transitions look better when smooth, in contrast to some exceptions, say, in Lindy, but even there they need to be smooth). Actually, it was Kathy Warwick (you know her), who recommended me to make sure I discuss that in my workshop, - to avoid dancers resorting to robot-like transitions from one pose to another. I like that LRC52292.jpg has a space for the follow to go, and the lead looks at you, but if we can see a bit more of the lead, (if you stepped just a step to the right), it would've looked more interesting. On a different subject, I am curious who the woman on LRC528919 and LRC52747.jpg is. Is she an instructor from Palo Alto? She looks like these dancer: http://42graphy.org/tango/sd-fest-2008/IMGP1746.html Interesting series, - thanks for sharing. Sorry for being wordy, - I hope you don't mind my comments. Igor PS. If you are interested, - I like the way this photographer (Lev Tsimring) did studio series of tango dancers: http://www.tangoalma.com/gallery7_pages/gal_1.html (use the arrows to see all 19 photos) and here: http://www.levtsimring.com/v/people/tango/ Maybe you can see some interesting ideas there... On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 1:23 AM, Larry Colen <lrc at red4est.com> wrote: > Photographing the dance portraits last Saturday was an interesting > experience. I think that I did eleven photo sessions over a span of about > four hours, which would have been fairly strenuous even if I wasn't > desperately trying to convince myself that I didn't have a cold. > > My lighting setup this time was to use the big white lighting with a > reflector umbrella off camera to the right. With a big mirror along the left > wall, I got more than enough fill. If anything I think that the light was a > bit flat. Though with most of my subjects being middle aged, that may not > have been entirely a bad thing. > > Artistically, I'm not entirely thrilled with the photos, but that wasn't the > goal of the production line environment. The goal was to get at least a few > that each paying customer would like, and I didn't have time for any sort of > equipment tweaking as I went along. > > http://www.flickriver.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157626009196594/ > > Comments, feedback and helpful suggestions welcome. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
