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
Life of Dance
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.
Studio Dance
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.
More Dance from the Past
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.
Shakers
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.
All My Life’s A Circle
November 2nd, 2007
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.
Boo!
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.
Vassanta’s Pick
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.
Wood Nymphs
October 19th, 2007
