More from NYC
December 21st, 2007
Duet In Flight
December 17th, 2007
Another dance shot from the Lois Greenfield workshop. The dancers are Dario Vaccaro and Patty Foster. This is from the second day of the workshop. When the dancers were arriving I noticed that Patty and Dario knew each other but had not known they were both going to be dancing for the workshop. They were obviously very happy to see each other. It looked to me like they would really like to dance together, so I decided I’d ask them to do that when my turn to shoot came.
Later, before I did any photos, I had a chance to talk with Dario. I told him I was interested in shooting choreography. He said he had a small dance company and was a choreographer. I encouraged him to show me some of his choreography when our time to work together came. He was very pleased to do that. When we were getting ready to shoot and talking about what Dario and Patty were going to do, Patty said she thought the photos would work better if she didn’t wear a top, so she would match Dario’s outfit. I didn’t have any objection to that. So I ended up doing some partial nudes even at the dance workshop.
Dario was very impressive with his strength and his talent as a dancer. Patty was there with him at every step. They made a great duet couple. I’ll post one or two more shots of them together in future posts.
Thanks Dario and Patty. It was great to meet and work with you both.
More from NYC
December 12th, 2007
Here’s another of my photos from the first day of Lois Greenfield’s workshop. The dancers are Julie Blume and Samantha Clark.
Something different
December 9th, 2007
It’s not dance (although those are pointe shoes), it’s not figure, it’s probably not even art. It’s just something I like, so here it is.
While I was in New York City for Lois Greenfield’s workshop I also got together with a few friends. Theda was one friend who joined several of us for dinner one night. We ate at the Cheyenne Diner, one of the last, if not the last, metal car diners in the city. Good food too…and we hung around all evening and talked and they didn’t mind. Check it out if you are in the city. It’s right across from B and H.
The next night I stopped off at Theda’s apartment on my way home from the workshop and we did some available light photos just for fun. I use the photojournalism definition of available light: any light that’s available. In this case it was a lone bedside lamp in her bedroom. I used my 50mm f/1.4 for all the photos that evening. On the D200 it is effectively a 75mm (in terms of 35mm cameras) so it somewhat limits the possibilities. But it also has the speed to work in low light and the shallow depth of field that is fun to play with. This shot was done at 1/15 sec at f/2.2. ISO was set to 800.
I like the shapes in this photo…the angles of the legs, the curves of the pointe shoes, and the selective focus and the play of the colors against each other.
Whenever I go to New York one of the first things I do is contact Theda to see if she is available for a shoot. She is a wonderful model and a “sure thing.” I always know, no matter what the situation, if Theda is modeling I’ll come up with a photo that is a keeper. Add to that the fact that Theda is a fine person and a lot of fun to work with and I just have to shoot with her whenever I get the chance.
I have more dance photos from the workshop to post and those will be coming. But I was looking through the shoot with Theda tonight and really liked this shot, so I’m sharing it.
Back Home
December 5th, 2007
I’m back from New York. I spent all day yesterday driving. It was snowing part of the way in the Pennsylvania mountains which resulted in a few white knuckle moments, but no serious problems. And I was back to Ohio just in time to use my new snow blower to clear the 4 inches of snow that came down last night from the walks and driveway.
After doing the snow duties this morning I sat down to start working on my photos from the workshop. A little experimentation showed me that PhotoShop CS can indeed open the raw files from Lois’ Leaf back. So, the problem I thought I was going to have of how to access the files was really non-existent. I’ve been looking through them and I think there are several that I’ll be sharing here.
Today you have the first of them. This dancer is Mayte Natalio. The photo is from the first day at the Lois Greenfield workshop…my first time using the Hasselblad with the Leaf Valeo 22 back. Mayte is obviously a tremendously talented dancer and she was a pleasure to work with.
It was nice shooting with a Hassy again…it had been a while. I think I had a bit of an advantage over some of the younger photographers attending the workshop because I was already familiar with the camera. And I’m old enough to remember what it was like when we had to advance film and cock the shutter back in the old analog days. The Hasselblad Lois uses is one of the wonderful older models designed for film…and the shutter has to be wound manually after each shot. That also returns the mirror to the viewing position.
Of course the files from that 22 mp back are wonderful. And the Broncolor strobes that Lois uses on reduced power produce a flash of very short duration which guarantees even the fastest movement by a dancer will be frozen and sharp.
More photos from the workshop will be coming in the next few posts…
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.
More from the past
November 28th, 2007
Here’s another of my old dance concert photos. This one has been hanging in my living room for pretty much the last 25 years. The dancer is Marcia Sakamoto, a visiting artist at the concert that was advertised by the flyer from my last post. Again, this was shot on film, Tri-X exposed at 1600 ISO and developed in Acufine. Camera was a Nikon F with an 85mm f/1.8 lens.
A goal I set for myself when I photograph a dance is to try to make a photograph that, when the photo is viewed it will create in the viewer the same feeling that was created by the dance itself. It’s pretty much an unattainable goal, but it provides my direction for what I’m trying to do with my photos. This photo is one of the very rare instances where I feel the photo comes pretty close to reaching that goal. I guess that’s why it has stayed on the wall in my home all these years.
Tomorrow I’m off to New York City to do a weekend workshop with Lois Greenfield at her studio. She is probably the best dance photographer in the world. I think I’ll be able to learn a thing or two from her. I’ll also be seeing some of my NYC friends including Dave Rudin, James Graham, Diana Diriwaechter and the world’s best figure model, Theda. And I hope to meet a few other on-line friends in person for the first time, if they can make it to our planned Friday night gathering. If all goes well I’ll spend Friday at the Guggenheim, do the workshop on Saturday and Sunday, and have Monday pretty much free, then leave for home on Tuesday. If I find a model in NYC who’d like to do a shoot on Monday I could do that during the day, but I’m not trying real hard to set anything up.
I’ll probably be able to post while I’m in NYC, so you may see something new here while I’m away if I have time and energy to get it posted.
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.
Dancer in flight
November 20th, 2007
Last week I took a bunch of my studio gear down to Ohio U and set it up in one of the rehearsal studios at the School of Dance. This gave me a chance to test how my current studio setup works for photographing dance. I took the biggest backdrop I have and all my strobe power packs. This let me shoot at ISO 100 instead of 1600 and allows the dancers to do things that are too extreme to try in a performance, things that they can’t really recover from gracefully.
A lot of dancers signed up for the chance to do this shoot and I think we all had a lot of fun. I learned that I need a larger background and probably some more strobe power. My Novatron units seem to have a fairly long flash duration which allows some minor blurring of very fast movements. I’ve written to Novatron tech support asking what the actual flash duration is on my units, but they haven’t responded and it’s been long enough I’m assuming they won’t respond. I’ve tried searching on line, of course, but haven’t turned up the information. But I can see from some of the photos from last week that they have a relatively long duration.
I also wanted to try out several different lenses with this setup and see what worked best. I ended up using my old 35-70mm f/2.8 zoom because it gave me some flexibility on cropping, kept me about the right distance from the dancers and handled the somewhat too small background well enough.
I’ll post some more from this shoot and I’ll get around to posting more shots from the concert as well. For now here is dance student Liz Dunlap in flight. I particularly like the shape she has created in mid-air here.
Lost Process
November 17th, 2007
Those of you younger than about 40 may not know that copy machines used to be only black and white. Along there in the 70s color copiers started showing up. They were awful. But it was color. And someone figured out that you could set up a slide projector and a mirror and project slides down into the machine and get color photos out. They were awful. But they were awful in an interesting way. Sort of like the things Holga lovers like these days. They were also cheap, so it was a cheap, quick, though not so easy way to get a color enlargement from a slide. With the right photo they could be quite beautiful too.
Well, color copiers are much better now and I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone projecting slides into them for prints for a long time…maybe there’s still a way to do that, but I’m sure the results are much too good to be interesting in and of themselves.
Anyway, this is a digital copy photo of a color Xerox of a color slide that I made at the OU School of Dance back in the mid-70s. The dancer is Mary Pat Cooney. She was dancing with a scarf when I shot this closeup. If I remember right we were on the roof of the Putnam School when we shot this. I wonder if it’s still possible to get up there.
I won’t tell you any stories about Mary Pat because I know she reads this blog and I could get myself into trouble. I’ll just say that she was a beautiful young woman, a very good dancer and a lot of fun to be around. One of the many dancers I enjoyed knowing and photographing back then, but certainly one who has always stood out in my memories of those days.
Mary Pat tells me that OU School of Dance Professor (later Director) Gladys Bailin was the choreographer for the dance in the post below with Lisa Eck and David Novitz. That would have been my guess, but I didn’t want to guess. Thanks for the memory, Mary Pat.
Mary Pat had a quote at the end of her last e-mail to me that I’m going to steal and post here because I love it:
“There is nothing so necessary for men as dancing…Without dancing a man can do nothing…All the disasters of mankind, all the fatal misfortunes that histories are so full of, the blunders of politicians, the miscarriages of great commanders, all this comes from want of skill in dancing…”
-Moliere
