Sunday 11 January 2009

To dance or not to dance

Who doesn't love to dance? It's got to be the best way to combine socialising with learning something new and keeping fit . I think Ireland is getting more into recreations outside of just drinking in the local and it's great. The influx of other nationalities here has really helped grow the options available to us. Just last night at a salsa party I learned common dances from Africa(Kazomba) and Brazil (Samba, Forro and Lambada) as well as seeing performances of Flamenco from Spain and a new form of Jive called Modern Jive or Ceroc as they call it in New Zealand. And all this in our little city of Galway in the west of Ireland. I now only have the problem of deciding when to dance and when to take pictures of dance...I just love both soo much it's a very tough decision ;)

As a photographer, a nightclub is a difficult lighting situation. I think it's really important to capture the feel of the club, so I like to keep the light as real as possible. I've found the best way to do this is to use a flash to freeze your subject and use a slow shutter speed to take in the ambient light, this is known as dragging the shutter.
I use auto focus, but select a point of focus first this allows me catch the action as it happens. It's a real benefit knowing the dance and the music as I can tell when the best opportunities for capturing a pose are coming and can be ready.

Settings on my Canon EOS 350D for the above shot were
Lens: 17-55mm 2.8
F-stop: 2.8
Exposure time: 1/30sec.
ISO: 800
Focal length: 17mm
White balance: Auto
Focus: Auto

1 comment:

Joel Todd said...

Hey Dee I really like the mix of ambient and flash a nice balance my question was how you managed the flash. Did you dial it in manually or did you leave it on eTTL(think that is what it's called for canon) with maybe some flash exposure compensation. I could see you specializing in some kind of dance photography but I don't know if the demand is there.