photoing_blues.txt 091001 0200 ========================== ========================== Technique:: You may well note that I use Pentax cameras in many of my examples. That is not because I'm a Pentax fanboy, but because the only gear that I've shot extensively with is Pentax. Unless I suddenly start making enough money from photography to justify buying into a second system, I become a professional reveiwer of photo equipment, or someone loans me their camera for a couple of weeks, I'm simply not going to know enough about other systems to discuss them accurately. The first thing that I discuss is knowing your system. Every piece of gear has it's own ideosyncracies, and you need to know them in order to get the most performance out of your system. ---------------------- Learn your system: Camera user manuals explain, more or less, how the camera is supposed to work, they don't explain what it does. Learning how each camera works at the edges of its performance envelope takes time, experience and even some research. As an example, some people did some research on the Pentax K100D RAW files and there is no change to the electronics at ISOs higher than 800. Shooting ISO 3200 doesn't give you any advantage over underexposing by two stops at ISO 800. =========================== Shoot raw: Compressing data into JPEG format throws away information in the areas of the photo where detail can't be seen. When you are shooting in low light situations, that is exactly the detail that you are trying to recover. =========================== Focusing:: Focusing in low light is tough. Autofocus is often more accurate than manual focus, but it's slow and prone to focusing on the wrong thing. ---------------------- Autofocus: There have been tests done to compare the accuracy of autofocus with manual focus that have shown autofocus to be significantly more accurate than manual focus. As with most modern technology, we can expect the gap to widen over time, especially since camera makers place more emphasis on improving automation on cameras, often at the expense of doing the same thing manually. Autofocus has two major flaws. It tends to be slow, especially in low light, and the shutter lag may cause you to miss the shot. The other problem with autofocus is that it is much better at finding something for it to focus on, than it is at knowing what you want to focus on. ---------------------- focus indicators: Most DSLRs have lights in the viewfinder that highlight what is in focus. These can come on when the autofocus locks on to something, or during manual focus, when one of the autofocus sensors detects that something is in focus. You have to be very careful with the focus indicators, they tend to work over a much broader area than you may expect, and the camera could be focusing on grain in the wooden dance floor, or a sign on the wall behind the dancers. This is something that comes with "knowing your camera". ---------------------- Prefocus with autofocus: Many cameras have a way to autofocus when the camera is in manual focus, or to lock out the autofocus temporarily. I have set up my Pentaxes so that the "OK" or the "AF" button will disable the autofocus. When I'm framing a shot of dancers, I'll half press the shutter, allow the camera to get autofocus lock, then press the disable button with my thumb. As long as the dancers don't move (out of the depth of field) I can then take the photo without any shutter lag. ---------------------- Manual focus: Manual focus is arguably the most difficult to do, but I have found myself using it more and more when I photograph dancers, to the point where I use it almost exclusively. As I mentioned in the equipment section, I have katzeye focusing screens in both of my cameras. As much as I love split prism focusing, in extremely low light, I generally can't see well enough to make use of it. However, the microprism ring does seem to work fairly well. Most of the time, I take advantage of the focus acquisition indicators in the viewfinder. The biggest hazard of these is that they don't always indicate focus on what you think they do. Time and again I look at a soft photo, only to find that the grain in the wooden floor is in perfect focus. The autofocus system, which also runs the focus indicators, is not only dumb, but lazy. It will trigger focus on whatever in the view is easiest for it to focus on. This will be whatever shows the best contrast, not necessarily what you find the most interesting. So, take advantage of the focus indicators, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they're looking at the same thing you are. One thing that I'll do when shooting a series of photos, is when I get a break in the action, I'll refocus. This way I'm a lot less likely to get a whole bunch of shots perfectly focused on the wrong thing. ---------------------- Trade resolution for depth of field: The smaller the image of something is on the sensor (the shorter the focal length or the further away the subject is) the greater the depth of field will be. This is why cameras with smaller sensors have more depth of field, to get the same angle of view, they need to use a shorter lens to make the image of the subject smaller, to fit it on the sensor. You can use this to your advantage, by using a shorter lens than you may need, and cropping in post processing. You lose a bit in resolution, but the tradeoff in depth of field may well be worth it. Besides, the shorter focal length can be very handy if the subjects move closer to you. ----------------------- Be aware of the narrow depth of field close to the hyperfocal distance: With a lens of about 30mm focal length, even at f/1.8 you will have a fair amount of depth of field when shooting subjects across the room. However, while it may seem that anything from seven feet to infinity is in focus, it isn't. If you get lazy and just leave the camera focused on infinity, things will look fine in the viewfinder (especially in low light) but very little, if anything, will actually be in focus. ---------------------- Focus trap: I don't know about other brands, but with Pentax you can mount a manual focus (or a quickshift) lens, put the body into autofocus mode, prefocus on a spot, and when the subject moves into focus, the shutter will trigger. This can be very handy when photographing birds, or racecars. However, it seems to have limited use in low light dance photography, because by the time the autofocus can figure out that the subject is in focus in the low light, it has moved out of focus again. ---------------------- /////////////////////////////////////////// =========================== Exposure:: Most tutorials on beginning photography seem to be mostly about exposure. There are whole books on choosing the appropriate shutter speed and aperture to get the photo that you want. There are also a myriad of techniques for deciding how much light you want to hit the sensor (or film) of your camera: expose to the right, grey card, incident light, the zone system. Lest this discussion become yet another text on basic exposure, I will assume that the reader has at least a passing familiarity with how to manually set a cameras exposure, understands the histogram and "blinkies" on a digital camera, and can at least do a web search on cocepts such as "expose to the right". On a digital camera there are three values that you can set to determine your exposure: ISO, shutter speed and aperture. In theory, you will want to balance ISO with noise, aperture/speed with depth of field, and shutter speed with motion blur. In practice, you will usually be running with your ISO at the highest value that you can get using just the in camera electronics, and your aperture wide open. You then increase the shutter speed to fastest value that will expose the sensor with enough light to capture a decent photo. Note that I said "enough light", not "correctly expose". You may often find it advantageous to trade off correct exposure for some other characteristic, such as subject blur. ---------------------- ISO: Film sensitivity used to be measured in ASA, but at some point, the initials ISO began to be used. When digital sensors came about, the same metric was used to measure the sensitivity of the sensor. The sunny 16 rule states that in direct sunlight, at f/16 the correct exposure will be (1/film speed) seconds. In short with ISO 100, it'll be 1/100 of a second, ISO 400 will be 1/400 and so forth. But what are ASA and ISO acronyms for? American Standards Association and International Standards Organization so someone sufficiently pedantic will note that refering to ISO is rather nonsensical. It is somewhat like referring to the speed limit as the DOT. Even so, as nonsensical as it may be, that is the term people tend to use, rather than sensor sensitivity, so that's the term that I'll use. Besides, it's easier to spell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Standards_Association ---------------------- Noise: Without going into boring (to many) technical detail of why, the darker an area in a photo is, the more noise that will be visible. Likewise, the higher the ISO, the more noise that will be visible. There's a technique called "Expose to the right" that helps minimize noise. The premise is that you expose the brightest part of the image (that you don't want to lose detail in, so you may accept clipping if there is a light, or specular highlight in the image) at a level that is just short of clipping. That raises the "signal" in all parts of the image as high as possible above the "noise". The technique of exposing to the right does require that you be able to view, and read, the exposure histogram. Do be aware though, that the histogram is based on the camera's conversion of the data to JPEG, and not the raw data, so it is not a perfect representation of the raw data. In post processing, you can then adjust the final exposure for the value that you want. This is one of the reasons to shoot RAW rather than JPEG. Note that you may not be have enough light to expose to the right, and still have sufficient shutter speed to sufficiently stop the motion. ---------------------- Shooting subjects under colored lights: Many venues enhance the mood by the use of colored lights. They may have gels over spots, or they may use colored rope lights. The first thing to note is effectively impossible to get good color balance in this situation. Another thing to note is that your digital sensor is effectively three interwoven sensors, one for red, one for green and one for blue light. Some cameras only have a "white light" histogram, which averages the three, while others have both a "white" and three separate histograms for each color channel. When shooting saturated colors, such as flowers, or people (dancers and musicians) under colored lights, it's very possible for the white histogram to show that the brightest part of the image is well below clipping, while in fact one color is past the point of clipping, and the other two are woefully underexposed. ---------------------- Trading dynamic range for shutter speed: Most DSLRs have 12 bits of dynamic range. That means that any sensor site can record a value between 0 and 4095. As an aside, the larger sensor sites on some full frame cameras allow them to have 14 bits of DR, which gives them 2 stops more range, or values from 0 to 16383). On top of that, at high ISOs, there's going to be a certain amount of noise, for the sake of argument, call it 4 bits, so you really only have the ten bits from 16 to 4095, that you're really able to use. If, for example, the nominal exposure is 1/5 second with ISO maxed and your aperture wide open, that makes it very tough to get clear shots without the dancers blurred, even if you manage to hold the camera perfectly steady for 1/5 second. If you are willing to trade dynamic range for shutter speed, you could under expose by a stop or two. Underexposing by a stop would mean that, in this camera, you would have the 9 bits between 16 and 2047, which when you "fix the exposure" in post processing would effectively double the noise so that the usable image was only the values of 32 to 4095. But even so, a noisy image where you can see the dancers may be better than a less noisy image of a couple of blurs. Different cameras react to underexposure in different ways. With my K100, it works better to underexpose at ISO 800, than to "correctly" expose at ISO 3200. With the K20, it definitely works better to shoot at ISO 3200. This is a case where you need to experiment with your camera to see what works. ---------------------- Shoot the subject's best lit side: It sounds obvious to say "Shoot subjects that are in the light", but the human eye works surprisingly well in low light situations, and its an easy detail to forget, especially when it seems that the best angle, or where you happen to be standing, is not looking at the lit side of the dancers. If you can, stand with your back to the lights, or at least facing the same direction as the lights. This has two benefits, it means that you'll almost certainly be photographing the subject's lit side. It also means that you're less likely to be shooting into a light, which can cause areas of the photo to clip, or worse, cause glare. -------------- ---------------------- Manual exposure:: A lot of the same problems with Autofocus, also apply to auto exposure. If there is a bright light in the frame, the camera will very likely adjust its exposure so that the light doesn't overexpose. Unfortunately, this tends to happen when you don't care if the light (which you may crop out anyways) is overexposed, and you do care if the dancer is underexposed. On Pentax, in manual exposure mode (or hypermanual as they call it) you can press "the green button" and the camera will automatically set the exposure to what it thinks is correct. Take a couple of test images, and look at the histogram, and the blinkies, and adjust your exposure accordingly. Unless you move your position, or they change the lighting, chances are that the correct exposure won't change much. At the very least, you should get a bunch of shots that are all fairly correctly exposed, rather than letting the camera choose and getting some that are right on, and some that are way off. ---------------------- Chimping can help, but it's not perfect: There are a some photographers that seem to take a picture, then spend the next minute looking at it on the display, going "Ooh, Ooh, Ooh" like a chimpanzee. This is why looking at the playback photos on your camera is called "chimping". One of the beauties of digital photography is the instant feedback, especially in difficult lighting situations. You can take a test shot, look at the histograms, or the blinkies, and adjust your exposure to something that should be pretty close to perfect. If you're worried about shutter speed, focus, or noise, you can zoom in, and see how blurry or sharp the picture is. We've all taken shots that look just fine on the quick review, but are out of focus, or blurred when we look at them on the computer monitor. This review shot can tell you a lot about the photo, but bear in mind, that it isn't based on the raw data, it's based on the camera's conversion of that shot to a fairly low resolution jpeg. You won't really know how it turned out until you look at it on your computer monitor. ---------------------- Shoot for the raw data, not for the image on the display: There are a lot of reasons that the display on your camera can lie to you. Not the least of which is that pictures on it will look darker if you look at them in daylight, and much brighter if you look at them in a dark room. The histograms, on the other hand, only fib a little bit. They will say the same thing whether you look at the picture in bright light, or pitch black. You may want a section of the photo to be pitch black in the final copy. If you set the exposure at 1/100 Sec so that the bright areas are acceptable and the dark area is black, when you're done, the black area will be black, except for the noise. If, instead, you set the exposure for 1/50, or depending on the highlights, 1/25 Sec, so that the bright areas are just shy of clipping (we're back to Expose to the Right again), if you print it straight, the bright areas will be brighter than you like, and the dark will have about the same amount of noise, as well as showing details that you don't want. However, if you then process the final exposure so that the dark areas are completely black, then the noise in the dark areas will be reduced by a factor of two, or four, and the light areas will be brought down to what you want them to be. You can always throw away data in post processing, but you can never regain data you lost at the time of exposure. ---------------------- Color balance:: Blues dancing is usually done in dimly lit rooms. The dim light is generally achieved by dimming incandescent (tungsten) lights, though it is sometimes achieved by the use of colored rope lights. In any case, the nominal source of the light, is usually a tungsten filament. You can usually get fairly close to as good as you are going to get by setting your camera's white balance to "tungsten". ---------------------- Setting the color balance in the camera: I am constantly talking about how you should shoot for the raw data, and correct everything in post processing. If that is the case, then setting the color balance at the time you shoot should not make any difference. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt. It can make post processing easier, if the pictures start out closer to correct, and I've read about some people doing experiments with some cameras that do alter the data stored in the raw file based on the color correction. ---------------------- Some cameras allow you to set a custom white balance by taking a picture of something color neutral and telling the camera that that is to be used as the reference for "white". When you do this, be sure to do it in the light that the dancers will be in when you photgraph them. If you're standing in a doorway next to a well lit hallway, but the dancers you're photographing are in the corner under a 10 Watt light bulb, take your greycard over to where they are standing (if you can), and set your white balance with the grey card in that light. You should also, if you get the chance, take a photo of the grey card, so that you can fine tune the white balance in post processing. For that matter, for the best results, you should go around the room, and photograph the grey card in every lighting situation presented, because the lighting is never even, and different incandescent bulbs, when turned way down, will be running at different color temperatures. That's what you should do, but that's not what you will do. Chances are, you'll set your color balance to tungsten, shoot with your camera set like that, and when you're post processing you'll look for color neutral objects in the photos that you can use to set your white balance. ---------------------- If it's white balance, why use a grey card rather than a white one? One reason is that many grey cards are specially printed to not only be 18% grey, but to be color neutral. Things that are meant to look white, might have extra blue in them so that they look white, even under yellowish light, or they may have yellowed and discolored with age. Your eyes are so good at correcting for the different color balances you get between sunlight, shade, electric lights, candle light, that you may not notice the subtle discoloration. Until you're trying to process your photographs, that is. Another reason is that something white will reflect a lot of light, often more than anything else in the frame. That means that one, or more, colors are at best very close to clipping at a perfect exposure, and are very likely to exceed the dynamic range of the camera, so rather than the channels reading R: 4113 G: 4098 B: 3897 the data will be stored as: R: 4095 G: 4095 B: 3987 so the red channel will be way off, the green a little bit off, and the blue will be nominal, tricking the post processing software into making the picture a lot bluer, and a little bit greener than it should be. ---------------------- Leaving the grey card at home: Greycards do a great job. The problem is that the 8.5x11" greycards are big and awkward to carry. There are credit card sized ones that are much easier to carry, and even easier, it seems, to leave them home, in the car, or someplace equally inconvenient. One trick that I use is that I have a watch where part of the face is nearly a perfect neutral grey. As such, as long as I'm wearing that watch, I've got a handy white balance reference, I just need to get a photo with it in the frame. =========================== Composition and taking the photo:: On artistry and taking risks: Getting clear, correctly exposed, color balanced photos are largely a matter of technique. There are artistic judgements to be made when trading off one characteristic, for another. But, by and far, experience will teach you a set of rules about what to do when, to get reasonably clear photos. Where to aim the camera, and when to press the trigger are a lot more about the art, and less about the craft. I'm going to make suggestions, that I think will help you get visually appealing photographs, but it is important to develop your own eye. There's already one person that takes photos the way I do, learn (or steal) from what I do, look at what others do, and work at taking pictures that nobody else does. Not every experiment will work. Chances are that most of them won't, but the bigger risks that you take tend to pay off with better rewards. If you shoot "safely", you may shoot 500 frames, and come home with 440 bad, 50 decent and 10 good shots. If you try completely new thing, you're likely to come home with 490 bad shots, 9 decent ones, and one amazing one that's worth printing up and hanging on your wall for years. Or, you might take 500 lousy shots, but learn something from your mistakes, and next week get 60 decent, 20 good, and two exceptional photos. ---------------------- Try different things: In this article, I make a lot of suggestions about thing that work. Try them, practice them, get good at them and learn how and why they work. Once you understand the rules, and the reason behind them, then break the rules. ---------------------- Learn the basic rules of composition: There is a whole library worth of books written on composing photographs, and for that matter drawings. It would be redundant, and a general waste of both of our time for me to try to cover material that was written about much more clearly elsewhere. ---------------------- Spend time looking at other people's photos: Photography has been around for something like 150 years. There are countless photos out there, there are countless good photos out there, there are even a lot of really good photographs of people dancing. Look at other people's photos, and try to understand what you do and don't like about them. ---------------------- Learn from critiques of your, and other people's work: The wise man learns from his mistakes. The clever man learns from other people's mistakes. There are a lot of places where people show photos for other people to comment and critique. Looking at these photos, and paying attention to the discussions is one of the best ways to learn what people do, and don't like. ---------------------- Be aware of the difference between "trained" and "untrained" tastes. If you've been dancing blues, or lindy, or tango, for a while, there's a good chance that a lot of the music that you used to love to dance to no longer holds the same appeal for you. Likewise, a lot of music that you used to hate, or just never saw the point of, is something that'll get you looking for a partner so that you don't miss out dancing to that song. As people learn more and more about a subject, be it music, wine, or photography, their tastes change. As the wine snobs might say, "they educate their pallette". A friend once categorized a style of jazz as "white wine jazz", because just as most people start drinking white wine before they develop a taste for red, certain forms of jazz are more accessible to people who are new to listening to it. The same goes for photography. People who spend a lot of time taking, and looking at photographs notice different things than people who haven't. Brilliant, eye catching colors to one, may be oversaturated, are artificial looking HDR to another. One person's beautiful sunset is another person's tired cliche'. One person's beautiful creamy bokeh, is another's out of focus blur. It is important to remember that in matters of taste, there is no right and wrong, but it can be helpful to consider the audience, when making a photograph, or getting feedback. ---------------------- Shoot from different heights: People are used to looking at the world from eye level. Granted, eye level is quite a bit different if your five foot nothing than if you're five foot fifteen. But, for most adults, there's a range of less than a foot that most people's eye level falls into. When people take a picture of other people, they usually hold the camera up to their eye, putting the lens very close to eye level, and take the photo with the camera more or less level, or possibly pointing slightly downward. Many perfectly fine photographs are taken this way. However, simply taking a picture from noticably above eye level, or from waist level or below can immediately make a photograph more interesting, if for no other reason than it shows things from an angle that most people aren't used to looking from. ---------------------- from low: If you shoot from about waist height, with the camera level, then if the subject is far enough away that their head is in the picture, their feet will be also. This is not a particularly unnatural perspective, because it is close to eye level of someone who is sitting down. I tend to enjoy photographing dancers with the camera very close to the floor. Most people don't spend a lot of time with their heads next to the floor, and even fewer spend a lot of time watching people dance from that angle. It is, however, tough to aim a camera when it is, at most, six inches off the ground. This is an angle that'll give you a lot of throw-away shots, and a few really good ones. Live view, where the camera displays what it'll see on the external display, could be very helful, especially if the display tilts and rotates. Even if you don't have, or use, live view most cameras will display the photo for a couple seconds immediately after the picture has been taken. You can look at that, and use it for guidance to aim your next shot. Manually focusing, when you can't even see through the viewfinder is somewhat challenging. There are a couple of options. The first is to rely on autofocus, and home that it focuses on the dancers faces, rather than, for example, their crotch. The other is to estimate the distance from the camera to the subject's faces and set the focus using the distance marks on the lens. This is an angle that often works a lot better when using a flash which allows you to stop the camera down to maximize depth of field, so that focus is not nearly as critical. ---------------------- from high: Often times venues will have a place where you can photograph dancers from a higher vantage point. In a crowded room this will give you the opportunity to photograph more than just the people on the outside, or from further than just a couple feet away. It's also the best way to get a shot of the crowd, or of the room. When a ladder, stairs, or sturdy chair aren't available, you can hold your camera over your head to take photos from a higher elevation. There are a couple of problems with this. The first is that it is very hard to hold the camera steady in that position, so it generally needs higher shutter speeds (or flash). Another challenge is that it is difficult to see through the eyepiece when the eyepiece is a foot and a half higher than your eye can reach. With experience, and practice it becomes easier to estimate where to aim the camera for the shot you want. This is a situation where live view can come in very handy, though taking test shots and looking at the review display can work nearly as well. I do recommend shooting a little wider angle of a lens than you might otherwise, to give you a little margin for error in your aim. You lose a small amount of resolution, but it's impossible to recover the image of something that was outside the frame. Another advantage of a shorter lens is that it gives a little more depth of field which can be handy when the autofocus finds something more interesting than what you want a photo of. ---------------------- extreme wide angle: Interesting shot can be obtained using very wide angle lenses. Again, it's a case of a perspective that people aren't used to seeing. The wider the view of the lens, the closer you need to be to the subject, lest they end up just a small dot in the background. By close, I mean that the camera may need to be within a foot or two of the subject. Some people could find this a bit distracting and intrusive, especially if they are in the middle of a particularly sexy dance. Another disadvantage of very wide angle lenses is that they don't tend to be very fast. Shooting with ultrawides, especially ultrawide zooms, therefore tend to require either a fairly brightly lit room, or a flash. Neither of these tend to be favorable in social dance venues. Wide angle lenses have a tendancy to show a lot of what is around the dancers. If you are holding the camera at eye level and fairly level, this means that almost half your frame will be of the walls and ceiling of the venue. Generally, a dance floor is more interesting than the ceiling. There's a lot happening on the dance floor, there isn't generally a lot happening on the ceiling. ---------------------- Look for other things to take pictures of: In tight quarters, there often won't be enough room to get a picture of the whole couple. This is where a lens that is longer than you might want will force you to be a bit more creative. Take pictures of the couple from the torso up, or just their faces, from the waist down, or just the feet. Sometimes the shadows will be a more interesting image than the dancers. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/2893203606/in/set-72157610704268297/ Likewise, there's a lot going on at a dance besides just dancing. Take pictures of the DJs, or people talking or watching the dance. Look for things that convey the dance, that most people don't spend a lot of time looking at. ---------------------- Make use of what is in the background. Rather than just taking a photo of someone watching the dance, take it from an angle that shows other dancers in the background. Or find a couple elements to juxtapose, someone grabbing a quick snack, while two people are having a steamy, sexy dance in the background. If there's a bright light that is giving you trouble, don't fight it, use it. It could provide a halo, or rim lighting. All of the usual warnings apply, you probably don't want your shot to make it look like a speaker stand is growing out of someone's head. I was photographing a couple having a rather sexy dance, and arranged myself so that a painting of Siggmund Freud was in the backgroud: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/3648999275/in/set-72157610704268297/ ---------------------- Mirrors and windows: Mirrors can make life tough. Most dance studios have them, and if you're not careful you'll get a lot of pictures that have someone taking a photo in the mirror. If you're using a flash and you shoot directly into a mirror or a window, the reflection of the flash will likely cause all sorts of grief in the shot. However, they can be used to your advantage. It's often impossible to get a shot with the faces of both dancers, but if they're in front of a mirror, you may see the face of one directly, and the other in the mirror. Or, the mirror may give you a much better angle than you can get directly. ---------------------- Be aware of the "empty space" in the frame. The human brain is excellent at filling in missing detail and ignoring extraneous detail. As such, it's very easy to only see what you're looking at in the viewfinder, such as the dancers, and not notice how much of the frame is empty background. It's also very easy to not notice that the picture cuts off just below the dancer's knees, even though 1/4 of the frame is just empty space above them. When photographing a couple at medium range, I like to hold the camera in portrait orientation. That way I can photograph them head to toe, or as close as possible to it. Especially if they are dancing close to one another. When they get closer, portrait orientation may only show one, and part, if any, of the other. In that case I may hold the camera in landscape orientation so that I shoot both of their torsos and heads. I try to be aware of who is dancing in the background. Oftentimes the dancers in the background are doing something as, or more interesting as the primary subjects. When dancers are further away, holding the camera in portrait orientation tends to just show a lot of the walls and ceilings. Even if you're mostly interested in one couple, you may by luck, catch another couple doing something really cool, or with great smiles on their faces. There is a lot of artistic freedom available in how you crop the pictures in post processing, but with a bit of thought when you compose the shot you can sometimes get two or three good, but very different photos, out of the same exposure. ---------------------- Listen to the music: People don't dance to metronomes. The music will change tempo and there are certain points in the song where interesting things are most likely to happen. The most common places for dancers to do something interesting are the breaks. Generally, the music will stop for a brief moment, and the dancers will often freeze when it does. Not only do the dancers tend to take an interesting pose when they freeze for a break, but the fact that they aren't moving makes it a lot easier to get a clear shot of them at slow shutter speeds. In a similar vein, at the end of a song, dancers tend to do an interesting dip, or lunge. In short, pay attention to the music. Think about what you would be doing, and when. Be particularly attentive at times that lend themselves to an interesting move. =========================== Flash:: slow shutter speed: ---------------------- Tungsten gel: ---------------------- Bounce off ceiling: --------------------- bounce off mirrors ---------------------- diffuser: ---------------------- shield the lens from the flash ---------------------- =========================== =========================== Infrared:: =========================== Processing:: ---------------------- Finding objects in the frame to set the color balance to: white shirts, grey shirts, black shirts, shoes. ---------------------- black and white: ---------------------- crop: ---------------------- noise reduction: ---------------------- sharpening: ---------------------- Take advantage of what doesn't work, and call it art. ---------------------- =========================== Take a lot of photos and throw away the bad shots:: Show only the really good ones, or all of them? I tend to post two galleries, one of the few best shots, that show off my skill as a photographer, and one that has all the decent ones, because a lot of people would rather have a decent shot of themselves dancing, than none at all. =========================== Try different things. In a tough situation, if you try different things, some of them will almost certainly not work. However, if you just go with what you think will work, there's a chance that nothing will turn out correctly, and it's almost certain that you won't learn nearly as much. =========================== Where to post your pictures? =========================== How to dance for photographers. How to get a photographer to take your picture? How to get a photographer to not take your picture? ============================= Learn how to hold a camera =========================== Live View::