New Dance Stuff
December 3rd, 2007
I’ve spent the past two days in a dance photography workshop with Lois Greenfield at her NYC studio. It’s been a great experience. Lois is every bit as wonderful a person as I could have hoped for. The workshop was a lot of fun. I met some other dance photographers from around the country and the world. It was a very small, select group of photographers but from as far away as Norway.
And I met and photographed some wonderful, amazingly talented dancers from NYC. I hope I’ll be staying in touch with some of them and shooting more dance with them.
I’ll be getting the photos I shot at the workshop on a DVD from Lois in the near future. We all shot with her Hassy and 22 mp digital back. Between that kind of technical quality and the great skill of the dancers, I am sure there will be some eye popping photos.
Meanwhile, here’s something I shot last month with my own equipment at Ohio University. It turns out my lighting setup is pretty much identical to Lois’ setup, for all practical purposes. Her strobes have a shorter flash duration, which makes a difference some times on stopping very fast action, but we tend to place our lights in the same basic locations.
This dancer is Amanda Kurtz, a senior dance major at Ohio University. She was the choreographer for one of the dance pieces that I photographed there in October. It was interesting to me that when she had her dancers show me the dance before I photographed it they did not use any music, but just went through the dance. That’s sometimes the case and it really doesn’t matter to me since I don’t photograph the music. I watched and thought about what moments I wanted to photograph. When I was leaving I just had a feeling about how the dance felt and I expressed it to Amanda by saying, “John Cage would enjoy that piece.” It wasn’t until I was photographing the piece in dress rehearsal that I heard the music…compositions by John Cage.
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