Another from the old days
November 23rd, 2007
Back to the archives today. I hope everyone in the US had a good Thanksgiving yesterday. Ours was very pleasant. Today we’ll have some old friends visiting and tomorrow the daughters will show up and we’ll do another feast.
This is a pretty bad copy of a poster and program I photographed back at OU in the mid-70s. The dancer is Linda Sohl, who was a senior dance major at the time. She has since had a very successful career as a dancer and choreographer in California. This is her company: http://www.rhapsodyintaps.com/
This photograph was an interesting challenge to make. I used my trusty Leica M2 and 35mm f/2 Canon lens. The rangefinder camera was much better suited to this photo than an slr would have been. To make the shot I had Linda slowly spin in place while I panned the camera down to stretch her body out over the frame. I could see what I was doing through the Leica viewfinder. To add the sharper definition at places I fired a strobe placed to the side at the beginning and again several times during the exposure.
This was, of course, way pre-digital, so there was no instant feedback and no photoshop to fix things up. I could probably make a similar photo now in photoshop in a few minutes and precisely control every element. In some ways that is better because it’s always good to have control as an artist. But it was fun back in those days with film. You still had control, but it required a lot more in-depth knowledge of just what was happening while you exposed the film. And there was a big element of chance that sometimes provided a nice surprise, although nasty disappointments were maybe more common.
This time it worked out. Linda was a dual major in dance and graphic design, so the design of the final poster was her work. The final piece also doubled as the program for the concert with all the performances and credits printed on the reverse side. It was an excellent design on Linda’s part and I am still very pleased with the photo today, 30 years later.
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