Wishing You A Spooky Halloween
October 30th, 2009
There’s Theda getting familiar with a very lucky Death. Just wanted to share something in keeping with the season. The trick or treaters, including that cute little boy in the last post, will be coming by looking for candy tomorrow night. I don’t think they’ll get any treats like Death did when he came calling on Theda, though.
I’ve seen half of the dance pieces that I’ll be photographing next week. Sunday I’ll watch the rest. Then Monday and Tuesday will be shooting days. I watch the lighting rehearsals, get familiar with each piece and take notes on the best exposures for each piece…and often for different parts of each piece if there is much change in the light levels. Lighting rehearsals are slow, but they offer a good opportunity to get to know what’s involved in a dance. I’ve blogged before about what I consider the necessity to know what’s happening when I shoot dance…not to just shoot it like a basketball game. I try to understand each piece and work to capture something of what the piece is about in my photos. It’s impossible to do that, but it provides my goal and direction for what I try to do.
Monday and Tuesday will be technical rehearsals. I’ll get to shoot each piece each night. Sometimes at a tech rehearsal they will run a piece more than once to get any technical kinks worked out. So it gives me plenty of opportunity to work to get just what I want. I would prefer to shoot the dress rehearsals, but at OU there is an audience for their dress rehearsals…usually classes from local elementary, middle and high schools. It’s rude and disruptive to photograph when there is an audience, so I won’t do it…and the school of dance agrees with me and doesn’t allow photography at those rehearsals anyway.
Maybe one of these days digital cameras will get to the place that they won’t be so noticeable during a performance. I see some developments recently that could get us to that point. There’s really no reason cameras have to be so noisy. There’s really no reason we need single lens reflexes with a noisy mirror flopping up and down. If I had a camera with a bright viewfinder (not through the lens), excellent auto focus, and high ISO performance like the latest pro Nikons…well that would be the perfect dance camera. With usable 6400 ISO and a short f/2.8 zoom…something in the 35-90 range (in full frame 35mm terms…I could get by with my 80-200 if nothing else was available) I’d be able to just go to the back of the performance space and shoot without anyone even noticing.
I have hopes that I’ll live to see a camera that will do what I want for dance photos. The Leica M9 isn’t it because it isn’t auto focus. I’ve shot dance with my Leica M2. It’s possible, but focus is a major challenge. I just did zone focusing and only used my wide angle lenses on the Leica for shots of the whole stage back in those days. I know better than to think I could get away with using the M9 for the main dance camera. I’ve actually been watching the new mini 4/3 cameras thinking one of them might provide what I’m looking for. They don’t seem to be there yet, but maybe in their next generation they will get there.
Compared to what we had to work with back in the 1970s when I started photographing dance using Tri-X pushed in Acufine…well the current crop of digital cameras are just fantastic. But we always want at least a little bit more, don’t we.
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