It has been a while since I posted some ballroom dance photos! There are a few of the professional shows from the 2013 Arthur Murray Fall Showcase that I have not yet featured on the blog. Today, I will post photos from the Swing show by the Silver Spring, MD studio.
This show had a lot of fun personality! There was a great playful character to the dancing that had a lightness and quick action that was fun to watch. This was a great display of Swing technique by these two that really made for some great photos.
The Swing is a dance that brings lots of people into the studio. It can be done to a lot of modern and classic rock music, so it has a familiar feel to all levels of dancers. These two put on a nice display to inspire students to continue learning new figures.
The speed of the action of this dance had great movement in her dress. It was hard to catch in the camera they were so quick! The Silver Spring crowd should be proud of another great showing by their staff.
We just watched the new motion picture, “American Hustle” which was a movie heavily focused on character development, and character interaction. In movies, the examples of the rule of thirds is used during scenes of dialog, and other half or close up shots of the actor’s faces. When there is only one face on the screen at a time, the extra space that the other third of the frame gives the audience a space to place themselves, or to place the other character that is not on screen.
Having this space really places you in the scene making the viewer more engaged in the film. If this space was not there, it will be jarring to viewers, and will create a tension – like something is not right. This can be used as a compositional element too whether in still or motion pictures. In these photos, the subject is placed on a third, looking through the long side of the frame.
This composition will also work for landscape or still life photos. Placing objects along the grids or having objects “face” the open part of the frame creates a better composition. It works for many situations. Additionally, it can make a great starting point. When presented by a tricky scene try this to make your photos better with your new camera.
Have you taken a few hundred photos with your new camera yet? Well it has been almost three days since Christmas – what are you waiting for? Keep taking all the photos you can with it to get more comfortable with how it works. You want to be able to pick it up and have it fire off a photograph quickly so you do not miss anything unexpected that may come along. But as you it becomes apparent that everything works, you may start think how to make your photos better. I still would not even change any of the settings on the camera. I would first concentrate on composition. This is something I have to do at every shoot, and it changes with each subject, each scenario, and each scene. No matter how good you are technically at making photographs, if the composition of the image is poor, then you do not have an image that you will like, or that other people will want to view and share.
One of the first composition rules that photography students study is the “Rule of Thirds”. Using the viewfinder camera as your boundary, divide the frame into 3 parts both horizontally and vertically. You end up with a grid that looks like this:
Rule of Thirds grid on a 4×6 frame
According to the Rule of Thirds, objects of interest should be placed along the lines that divide the frame into three parts. This includes horizon lines, faces of people, or other objects of interest. Usually they are the main subject of the photograph. You can see here in this photo that I did not follow this rule, and put my main subject right in the middle of the frame. This is one of the reasons that this photo looks more like a snap shot from vacation rather than a professionally setup image.
You can see the rule of thirds in many professional photographed still and video images. The news anchors on television may start in the middle of the screen, but they are quickly moved to the left or right third of the screen. This makes for a more pleasing image to the eye – giving the subject more room to breathe in the frame, and more room for your eye to travel in the frame putting your subject in context. These are with people images, but it can work with images of inanimate objects, or in landscape photography as well.
