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
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.
