Thanks Frank, and Walt. One very nice thing about this weekend is that at times I felt that my dancing didn't actually suck. The fact that at many of those moments I had attractive ladies in my arms also improved my mood.
I did not put nearly the energy into getting good photos of the bands that I did of the dancers. Plus, when the bands were playing, I often wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to dance to live music, rather than take photos. Hardly a week goes by without my taking at least some photos of musicians. Besides, the dancers were my friends and "customers", rather than the musicians. Although, I have sort of become friends with the band that played Sunday, they really like the photos I got of them when they played at a dance a few months ago. However, they 150 or so miles from here, so I don't see them that often. There are a lot of interesting facets to dance photography. One is understanding that the dancers have very different goals than photographers. To a large extent, they just want photos that show themselves dancing, and are willing to forgive (or not even notice) a lot of technical flaws in the process. Another is that while they love having pictures of themselves, that isn't why they are there. They're there to dance, not to pose for photos. They also, in general, aren't willing to put up with strobes in order to get cleaner photos. I could go on at great length about how it helps to understand the music, to know when people will be doing something special, or when they'll stop moving for a moment. I could also go on about how important it is to vary your shutter speed to get some relatively sharp photos, and others that accentuate the blur from motion. And, of course, there is always the bit about waiting for the critical moment. But the truth is that there are so many technical challenges to shooting people moving in low light, just getting exposure and focus right better than half the time is beating the odds, and a significant portion of the time, I just click the shutter when the technical issues align, and worry about the critical moment later. I really hate to advocate spray, pray and delete as the way to get good photos, but it sometimes seems that my skills at throwing away photos are more important in dance photography than my skills at taking them. It was kind of fun shooting the dancing at the park on Sunday, where the trickiest lighting I had to worry about was backlight from the cloudy skies, so I just tried to have trees in the background, or get higher so I had pavement in the background. On Apr 26, 2012, at 7:52 PM, [email protected] wrote: > I thought that too, Walt. The fact that Larry is a dancer himself shines > through in these photos. > > Btw, Larry, I looked through the original, larger set. Didn't see hour post > wrt the abbreviated set until after I looked at the original post. > > :-) > > cheers, > frank > > "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." -- > Christopher Hitchens > > --- Original Message --- > > From: Walt Gilbert <[email protected]> > Sent: April 26, 2012 4/26/12 > To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: GESO SF Blues Exchange > > On 4/26/2012 9:40 PM, [email protected] wrote: >> However the ones I saw were generally of very high quality, especially the >> dance photos. You obviously have a feel for this: you are able to capture >> emotion both on their faces and in their body positions. There's a >> dynamicism to these, as if I'm there seeing them sway and move. > I suspect that could be accounted for by the fact that Larry is a > not-too-shabby dancer himself. > > -- Walt > > -- > 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. > -- > 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. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- 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.
