As promised, here are photos from Columbia, MD professional show from the Arthur Murray Summer Showcase. The sale just ended on these photos at the proofing website, but they are still available to view and share. I want to let everyone that came to view and purchase photos that I appreciate your support of our photography. We put a lot of effort to create the best ballroom dance images, and post the thousands of images for you to find! Thanks for keeping the servers running with your orders. We are always thinking of better ways to bring these images to you, and give you options for your photos, and I will be posting more about those options in the coming weeks. The labs that print these images have lots of sales in the summer months, and I’ll pass them along to you. Stay tuned!
The images in the post today are from the Viennese Waltz professional show by the Columbia, Maryland studio. The Viennese Waltz is a challenging dance especially on a crowded dance floor. It differs from the regular, slow waltz, by having more speed and rotation in the steps. It is a beautiful dance when the dancers know what they are doing, and that is what these two displayed for the audience. They had beautiful dance lines, extensions in their frame, and they make it look effortless!
It is a busy day at the studio! We have two things expiring on the website today making for lots of deadlines for us. First, the sale on the Arthur Murray 2013 Summer Showcase is ending tonight. This is the last chance to get 20% off any photo products from this event. This applies to your entire order on prints, canvases, albums, or digital downloads. Thanks to everyone that has been to the website already and placed your orders! We are working to getting them placed with the lab today so that they can be sent to you in the mail this week.
I know that I have a few more professional showcases to highlight on the blog, but I will get to them very soon – promise! The second thing on the website is that the photos from the Baltimore Dancesport Challenge held on March 16, 2013, are expiring! Today is the last day that you can go to the website to view your photos, share them, or place orders for prints and digital downloads. After tonight, the images will be going into the electronic archive, and will not be viewable on the website.
Baltimore Dancesport Challenge
To get them back out, it is $30 to retrieve them from the server and re-upload them to the photo server. There were some really nice images from this event, and I hope you were able to see them. There were lots of competition, spotlights, showcase routines, and professional showcases by Julz Tamarkina and Jean-Michel Erole. Please pass the link on to anyone else that attended and would like to see the photos before they are gone. Thank you!
Managing thousands of photos can be daunting task when returning from a shoot. The Library and Develop modules are where I live when using Adobe Lightroom. These have almost all the functions I need to manage and edit large sets of photos from events that I photograph.
Lightroom Module Selection Bar
Photography Software
I have talked about the Library and Develop modules in previous posts, but today, I want to focus on the Print Module. This is the next most used section for me. From here, you can prepare images for printing at the lab or at your home printer if you have one available. None of the photos from TimeLine Media are printed at home – all are sent to professional labs prior to sending in the mail. Why? The labs are experts at making prints. They print these optically onto photographic paper, not inkjet printing. There is still lots of development being done with professional inkjet printers, but I still prefer the optical prints on Kodak or Fuji paper.
Printing Options
The Print Module, much like the Develop module, also has presets available to use in your work. Lightroom comes with some built in presets that define what size print you like to make, and on what size paper on which you are printing. This is very helpful if you have a specific frame size in mind for your photo. You simply select the size photo, and you can instantly see if the photo fits well, if you could go larger, or if you need to change the perspective of your photo. All of these changes are easily made within either the Print or Develop modules:
Photo size selector
The next panel down allows you to change your page setup. Here you can change the background color of your page, or add a watermark. This helps to see if you final print will look better on a traditional white or black matte background, or if you would look better on a funky background that is uniquely fitted to your image:
Page setup
Ballroom Brag Book
Once you have all of your settings completed, you can save your favorite setup as a preset. This will allow you to apply this template for printing to any photo. You only need to select the photo from the Library Module, and drop it into the preset template in the Print Module. This is where you can add your creativity to your photography by creating new templates. I recently used this to make a ballroom dance book for the Arthur Murray studios in the area.
The book was 10″ x 10″, so I created a new template with these dimensions. My thought was to have a large collage with as many photos as I could fit on the cover to show how many great photos we have made over the passed year. Since the cover was square, I had the idea to make each image square. With this in mind I made a 1″x1″ square, then copied and stacked another 1″x1″ square on top of it. To complete a 10″x10″ cover, that made 100 photos! It took a long time to create the template, but I was really pleased with the results! It was a great way to get attention at the photo booth. If you want to use my template, I have attached it here-
