And More Dance
November 18th, 2008
Lighting, of course, is key to successful dance performance photos. And particularly when working with student productions I never know what I’m going to encounter. The Ohio University School of Dance has an excellent lighting designer on the faculty who teaches lighting design. When he lights a piece I know I’m going to be getting good photos. His students also do a good job when they do the lighting, but there are sometimes surprises for me as they learn the exacting craft of lighting design.
Most often what I encounter that provides a challenge for photos is a lot of range in the intensity of the light. Since built-in exposure meters are useless in this lighting situation I have to shoot with the camera on manual and adjust by eye as the light changes. That’s one reason I like to attend the lighting rehearsals. I take test exposures and make notes. When I’m shooting I’ll have a notepad open beside me with the lighting adjustments for each dance noted. I also do quick “chimping” to check the histogram now and then to make sure I’m not too far off.
This piece was one of those curve balls for photography. Yes, that’s right, the piece is lit by flashlights carried by the dancers. There were parts of the piece where that was the only source of light. Thankfully most of the dance also had some, not much, but some, light thrown in from the stage lights.
My exposures ranged from 1/15 to 1/100 of a second at f/1.4 at 1600 ISO. My goal was to capture the feel of the light and the piece while still getting an occasional somewhat sharp photo. I think it worked out pretty well.
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