November 14th, 2007
Dance has most of my attention these days, in case you hadn’t noticed. Contrary to some comments I’ve heard, I have not quit doing figure photography and have no plans to. But dance is now the main thing I’m interested in photographing. Figure work will continue, but no longer as my primary subject matter. And I will post more figure work here from time to time. But for now most of what you’ll see here will be dance photos.
I spent the day yesterday at Ohio U doing photos of dance students, this time using my studio lights and background. I’ve been playing plumber at home today, so I haven’t had time to look at what I got yesterday, but I expect to be posting some of them in the next few days. I also delivered my photos of the dance concert I photographed a couple weeks ago. Finally got all the post processing work finished. You’ll see more of those photos here soon, too.
But for today, since I’ve been otherwise occupied under the kitchen sink most of the day (and without any real success…I’ll be calling a professional plumber tomorrow since the problem is clearly beyond what I can deal with with my tools and experience), here is another of my “vintage” dance photos.
This is Lisa Eck in the dance studio on the third floor of the building on Court Street in Athens that was the original home of the Ohio U School of Dance. This was probably taken in 1974 or 75. For those who care about such things, it was shot with a Leica M2 and a Canon 35mm f/2 lens. Film was Tri-X developed in D-76 1:1. That camera and lens combination was a favorite of mine for many years. In fact, right now that M2 is sitting in my camera locker with that Canon lens mounted on it. Haven’t shot with it for many years, though…not since I switched to digital. Some day maybe there’ll be a digital camera that works as well as that old M2. I just shot a photo of an old 11×14 print with my D200, but I think it looks pretty good, considering.
Lisa was a very talented dance major who I photographed a lot. I also liked her, but I lost touch with her after we both left Ohio U. She performed with a circus when she wasn’t attending college. Last I heard of her she had injured her back in a fall during a trampoline act, but was recovering well. I’ve tried to track her down through the internet, but had no luck. I also asked around at the School of Dance, but no one there knew what had become of her. Wherever she is, I hope life has been good to her.
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November 10th, 2007
I’ve finally finished the editing of the dance concert I photographed at Ohio U a couple weeks ago. I ended up with about 2100 photos. They needed noise reduction and individual tweaking of exposure on each shot. It took Noise Ninja about 36 hours to run all those files. Then I used ACDSee to batch the exposure adjustments. I did half of them in a day, the other half the next day. Long days. After doing the tweaking on 1000 photos the program would then save them all…that took 3-4 hours. I’ll be taking a serious look at how to better manage that work flow before I photograph the next concert.
But I’m very happy with the photos and with what I’ve learned about doing dance photography in the digital age. As I’ve mentioned, in the old days of Acufine and Tri-X the necessary increase in ISO resulted in an undesirable increase in contrast. The negatives generally had black shadows and blocked up highlights. They were tough to print. Now, with my D200 I can set the contrast to low to compensate for the harsh theater lighting while boosting the ISO up to 1600 to provide a good exposure. The ISO has no effect on contrast – they operate independently. That makes a huge difference.
And, of course, I’m working in color now, with excellent color balance. In the old days there really wasn’t much of a color option. If you filtered to compensate for the color shift the filter blocked so much light that the exposures got too long to stop action. And color film at 1600 ISO was very grainy and soft.
Another “new” camera feature is auto focus. I’ve never been a big fan of it for general photography. It’s often slower than I would be without it and it insists on refocusing even when you are taking multiple shots at exactly the same distance from the subject. But follow-focusing on dancers was always a challenge in the old days. I found that the D200 could do that much more reliably than ever could, even in my much younger days. Back then it was pretty normal for 1/3 to 1/2 of the frames to be a little or a lot out of focus. I had very few out of focus shots at this last concert. The auto focus was right on almost every time.
This coming week I’ll be going back to OU to drop off the photos and while I’m there I’m going to spend the day doing dance photos using my studio strobe lights. I tried out the lighting setup I plan to use today at the studio. My friend and model, Mandy,
http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=156097 came to the studio to help me with the setup. Mandy isn’t a dancer, but she is an athlete, so she just jumped around in front of the background for me while I fine tuned my setup. This is one of the shots we got. Thanks for the help, Mandy.
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November 8th, 2007
Here’s another of my old dance photos. This is from a concert at Ohio University in 1975. The dancers are Lisa Eck and David Novitz. I’m afraid I don’t have a record of who was the choreographer for this piece. Ohio University School of Dance faculty members Gladys Bailin, Les Ditson and Pat Welling were the choreographers featured in this concert, but I don’t remember which of them did this particular piece.
David was a dancer and a photographer. As I remember, which is not reliable after all these years, David found he could not photograph dance because he was too involved in it. He was distracted by details of dance technique and that kept him from focusing his attention on photo technique. That is a problem I’ve never encountered since I can not dance at all and have no real knowledge of dance technique. I still view and respond to dance in a more naive manner and I prefer it that way.
This concert was fun for me but also a lot of work under pressure. I photographed the concert in dress rehearsal then developed the film, made proof sheets, edited the shoot, made 11×14 prints, mounted the prints and hung a show of the dance photos from the concert in the lobby of the concert hall in time for the performances a couple days later.
This photo has been used and published quite a bit. It could look familiar to you if you follow dance since it appeared in Dance Magazine many times in the 1970s when the Ohio University School of Dance used it in their recruiting ad in that magazine for quite a while.
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November 5th, 2007
I’ve done some digging around in the attic and found some of my old dance photos. These are from the dance, “Shakers” by Doris Humphrey. Doris Humphrey died in 1958, but this dance was performed at Ohio University in 1970 thanks to a system of writing down, or scoring, a dance that was used to record it for the future. I don’t have any information from the production, but I remember that there was a guest artist who came in to interpret the score and direct the choreography.
The photos here are from a newspaper full page layout about the dance. It was published in the Newark (Ohio) Advocate where I was working as a photographer during the summers while I went to school at Ohio University.
I don’t think I ever really knew why my newspaper decided to print this story about a dance concert that was already over and had happened at a college 100 miles away. Maybe my old friend Bruce Humphrey who was the photo editor at the Advocate back then can tell me…but I’d be really surprised if he remembers such a minor event that many years ago. Most likely they were just being nice to me.
This dance was absolutely electrifying. The tension between the men and the women was visible. Neither sex ever crossed the line in the middle of the stage. This, of course, was a representation of the celibacy of the Shaker movement.
The quality of these files is not all that great. I photographed them from the original newspaper paste-up, which was put together with rubber cement in 1970. I simply took a photo with my D200 of each of the photos in the layout. I did a little clean up, but not too much. There is some damage from the rubber cement, but I think the prints have held up very well after all these years.
The original photos were taken with a Nikkormat Ftn using Tri-X film rated at 1600 ASA and developed in Acufine. Contrast was always a very tough problem back then. Boosting the film speed with Acufine was essential to get any image at all in the dark stage lighting, but doing so also boosted the contrast and the light was always contrasty to begin with. Printing was always a challenge.
I’ll be sharing some more of my old dance photos along with the new things I’ve started shooting. Right now Noise Ninja is hard at work on the more than 2,000 files from last week’s dance concert. That should be done and I should be able to start editing those photos tomorrow.
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November 2nd, 2007
Almost 40 years ago when I was a clueless 17 year old photographer I walked in to the dance department at Ohio University looking for something to photograph. I had never seen anything like modern dance before. It wasn’t something I was likely to encounter in the small town where I grew up and it wasn’t something that was ever on television. I fell in love with what I found there.
For some reason the director of the department, Shirley Wimmer, seemed to like me and encouraged me to photograph. Soon I was taking photos of all their productions.
That was a great year of awakening in my life. I was never the same after that year. Encountering modern dance changed my life forever. And that change has made me very happy. It probably planted the seeds of my losing interest in photojournalism and ultimately seeing photography as a way to express myself as an artist.
Thinking back on that year, it’s amazing to me all the things that I experienced, not really understanding what was going on. I was really overwhelmed by all that I encountered as a freshman in college. My high school was designed to turn out factory workers. I was totally unprepared for college. But I discovered English Lit courses where all I had to do was read the best books ever written and talk about them in class with a teacher who could help me understand them.
And there was the Comparative Arts course, taught by Ivan West, which opened up the whole world of art and music to me. Most students avoided Ivan West because he was known as the hardest instructor in the program…but he insisted that we learn and understand the material and that was what I wanted to do, so I deliberately signed up for his class each quarter.
And there was dance. I still marvel at how fortunate I was that year. I was able to see a “concert” by John Cage with Merce Cunningham at the university auditorium. I’ve never forgotten that concert. It influences my photography and my understanding of art and life to this day. John Cage stood at the podium with two decks of cards. In one deck each card contained a short story or a Zen Koan. On the other deck were numbers…from 15 to 45, I believe, but I don’t really know. Cage shuffled the two decks and put them face down on the podium. Then he drew a card from each deck and read the story for the number of seconds indicated by the number card. And Merce Cunningham danced to it.
I loved it. I didn’t even begin to understand it, but I knew it was special and it meant something. After that concert I read John Cage’s books and listened to his music and I began to understand what he was doing and to learn from it.
I learned to listen to everything I am hearing when I’m at a concert. The baby crying and the loud truck in the street outside are part of the unique experience of that moment in time and can be appreciated as a part of the whole. I learned to see all movement as dance and to just experience the joy of movement and sound in the world every day. I can’t imagine how different my life would be if I hadn’t learned to listen and see this way.
After I left Ohio University I still returned for a time to do dance photography. But life got more complicated and there just wasn’t time for me to do that work in the way I wanted to do it. I stopped photographing dance.
Recently I’ve been wondering what I should be photographing next. I’ve been doing figure photography as my main subject for several years. It’s time for a change. I’ll still do figure work, but something else needs to take the foreground now.
So, I contacted the current director of the Ohio University School of Dance. What a pleasant surprise it was that she remembered me after all these years and was happy with the idea of me returning to photograph their concerts.
So, I’ve photographed a dance concert again. These are a few samples. There will be more dance photos coming as I get time to edit the shoot. I also plan to write about how I photograph dance and why as well as the relationship between dance and photography. I’ll still be posting some figure work now and then, but expect to see more dance than nudes. I may have some other non-figure photo directions coming soon too.
But I’m very happy. I love dance and I’m shooting dance photos again. Life is good. Dance is wonderful.
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October 27th, 2007
It’s trick or treat night here, so here’s an oldie Halloween photo for you…Halloween Eve.
The weather isn’t looking too good for tonight. We live in the middle of the city, but we can never know how many trick or treaters will show up on any given year. We’ve had hundreds and there was one cold miserable night when only two wanted candy badly enough to go out and ask for it.
So, I’m back from the store and have plenty of candy on hand now. Our house is always popular because I only buy the good candy. Good is, of course, defined as candy that I like. That comes in handy on the years when no one comes begging…more for me.
I’m real busy right now working on a new photo project. Should have photos to share in a few days. It’s something completely different.
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October 23rd, 2007
I’ve mentioned before that I consider my models to be co-creators of our photos. I always give my models all the photos we do together on a disk in full resolution. I’ll also photoshop their favorites for them if they don’t want to do that work, or are not skilled at photoshop.
I often hear concern from other photographers that models will chose the wrong photos or that they will do a bad job preparing them. My point is that I think the models have just as much right to do as they please with the photos as I do. After all, that’s THEM…that is their image, their body, their face. In many ways they have a lot more of themselves invested in those photos than I do. Why shouldn’t they make their own choices and do with those photos as they please?
Sure, sometimes I don’t think the photos a model may chose are the best photos from our work together. But models often look for different things in photos than what I’m looking for. And why shouldn’t they? Is my vision the only one that is valid? Of course not.
But, more often than not I benefit from the editing that my models do. Sometimes they find photos that I might have overlooked in my own editing process. And, seeing what they like from a shoot tells me more about them and helps me understand what other people may be seeing in my work.
This photo is one that Vassanta chose from our last shoot together. She did the photoshopping on it and sent me a copy to see what I thought. Well, I think it’s a fine photograph…if I do say so myself. Vassanta’s great beauty really shines through here. Thanks, Vassanta, for finding the shot and getting all ready for me to post on here.
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October 19th, 2007
I’m just back from a quick trip to West By God Virginia to do this photo. My friend, Ralph Barker, stopped by for a visit this summer on his way to West Virginia to do some photography. When he posted a photo of this waterfall that he had shot I had to ask where it was located. Turns out it is in Blackwater Falls State Park. I’ve been to that park dozens of times, but had never been to this “other” waterfall. I told Ralph that there was something missing from his shot and I thought I was going to have to see what I could do to add the missing element.
After a couple hours of shooting we had breakfast at the lodge and Gaea and I piled back into the truck for the six-hour drive back home. So in a 23 hour period I drove 12 hours, slept 6 hours and shot for 2 hours. A long day, but I think it was well worth it. Both models are beautiful and very talented. They really worked hard to help me get this and quite a few more photos. It was actually one of the best shoots I’ve ever had.
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October 16th, 2007
Here’s another photo of Vassanta for you. I’ve spent some time today editing my last shoot with this beautiful model and it looks like I’ll be posting more of her over the next few weeks.
I like this shot because it shows her lovely figure in nice light, but also because of the strange and interesting thing the light is doing. There are two light sources in this photo…daylight from a window to the left and incandescent from a light inside to the right. The different colors of light are fighting for dominance in this photo, with Vassanta’s body being right in the middle of the battleground. I find the different colors and the transition between them interesting. But most of you are probably just looking at Vassanta. Guess I can’t really blame you for that.
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October 13th, 2007
A French web magazine has done a feature on my work. You can read it here: http://universdartistes.blogspot.com/2007/10/dave-levingston.html
I’m also doing an interview with them, so maybe there will be a second story sometime soon.
Also, I just noticed that about the time I was dealing with the death of our friend this blog passed its first anniversary. Sort of snuck up on me. I’m not sure where I’m going to be going with this thing, but I guess I’ll keep it up a while longer and see where it leads me.
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Dance has most of my attention these days, in case you hadn’t noticed. Contrary to some comments I’ve heard, I have not quit doing figure photography and have no plans to. But dance is now the main thing I’m interested in photographing. Figure work will continue, but no longer as my primary subject matter. And I will post more figure work here from time to time. But for now most of what you’ll see here will be dance photos.
I’ve finally finished the editing of the dance concert I photographed at Ohio U a couple weeks ago. I ended up with about 2100 photos. They needed noise reduction and individual tweaking of exposure on each shot. It took Noise Ninja about 36 hours to run all those files. Then I used ACDSee to batch the exposure adjustments. I did half of them in a day, the other half the next day. Long days. After doing the tweaking on 1000 photos the program would then save them all…that took 3-4 hours. I’ll be taking a serious look at how to better manage that work flow before I photograph the next concert.
Here’s another of my old dance photos. This is from a concert at Ohio University in 1975. The dancers are Lisa Eck and David Novitz. I’m afraid I don’t have a record of who was the choreographer for this piece. Ohio University School of Dance faculty members Gladys Bailin, Les Ditson and Pat Welling were the choreographers featured in this concert, but I don’t remember which of them did this particular piece. 
I’ve done some digging around in the attic and found some of my old dance photos. These are from the dance, “Shakers” by Doris Humphrey. Doris Humphrey died in 1958, but this dance was performed at Ohio University in 1970 thanks to a system of writing down, or scoring, a dance that was used to record it for the future. I don’t have any information from the production, but I remember that there was a guest artist who came in to interpret the score and direct the choreography.
The photos here are from a newspaper full page layout about the dance. It was published in the Newark (Ohio) Advocate where I was working as a photographer during the summers while I went to school at Ohio University. 
This dance was absolutely electrifying. The tension between the men and the women was visible. Neither sex ever crossed the line in the middle of the stage. This, of course, was a representation of the celibacy of the Shaker movement.
The quality of these files is not all that great. I photographed them from the original newspaper paste-up, which was put together with rubber cement in 1970. I simply took a photo with my D200 of each of the photos in the layout. I did a little clean up, but not too much. There is some damage from the rubber cement, but I think the prints have held up very well after all these years.
I loved it. I didn’t even begin to understand it, but I knew it was special and it meant something. After that concert I read John Cage’s books and listened to his music and I began to understand what he was doing and to learn from it.
It’s trick or treat night here, so here’s an oldie Halloween photo for you…Halloween Eve.
I’ve mentioned before that I consider my models to be co-creators of our photos. I always give my models all the photos we do together on a disk in full resolution. I’ll also photoshop their favorites for them if they don’t want to do that work, or are not skilled at photoshop.
Here’s another photo of Vassanta for you. I’ve spent some time today editing my last shoot with this beautiful model and it looks like I’ll be posting more of her over the next few weeks.
