photoing_blues.txt 091001 0200 =========================== 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. ===========================