We are ready to start Day 2 of dancing at the DC Area Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles! We had a fun time yesterday and made thousands of great photos. Thanks to Chris and Neil for helping us – we snuck out on the dance floor for a few heats. We hope to have all the photos up on the website by next weekend.
At this time, we had two parts to our weekend. Not only did we photograph the events on the dance floor, but we also participated! Dancing while managing photography is by and large a difficult task on both ends. Although we are well-practiced on both, our brains cannot run at peak on either at the same event. However, it still is valuable to dip into dancing. While it is good for physical health, it puts me in a different mindset during the event. Now I have a real feel for what dancers that we are photographing are seeing. In particular, I see what the audience looks like from the spotlight, and I hear the reactions from friends around the room. Undoubtedly it helps to push me to make even better photos over the weekend!
Another day of dancing and photographs is upon us! I am charging all the batteries, cleaning all the lenses, and packing up the car for the DC Area Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles. The dancing starts this afternoon and continues until Saturday night. These are so much fun for us to shoot. The only dance studio we have taken lessons is the Arthur Murray in Tysons Corner, VA. We appreciate the challenging work the teachers put in to getting students in front of the judges. There has been a lot of cramming the last couple of weeks! When you see familiar faces out on the floor, it gives us a home-field advantage in making good photos – they are some of my favorites every year. If can’t make it out this time, they have more events coming throughout the year. As usual, the photos from this weekend will be edited, sorted, and posted to the proofing website here-
Today’s topic of depth of field, or DOF for short, is what is usually the first step you take to making your photos look more “professional” compared to snap shots or photos you take from point and shoot cameras. Having a shallow depth of field in your photos allows your subject to stand out from the background. Just like in English composition class, your subject must be clear, and obvious to the reader. It does this by blurring all of the other elements in the picture except for your subject. When you have a camera set to program, or auto mode, it will try to get everything in the frame in sharp focus, because it cannot determine what is your subject.
Boston, MA
In the above photo, what is the subject? Is it the Quincy Market building, the tower in the background, the crowd in front, or the one of the people in the foreground looking directly at the camera? This is an example of a photo with a large or deep depth of field from a cell phone or point and shoot camera. Everything from the front of the photo to the back is in focus making the subject hard to pick out for the viewer.
To up the quality of photos, professional photographers often use DOF to highlight subjects, and direct the viewer’s eye right to their subjects. Making the DOF shallow, or short will make the subject sharp, and blur the surrounding elements in the frame. If you have been following my blog for a while, you can see I shoot lots of ballroom dancing. Shooting events with lots of people in the audience and hotel ballroom elements scattered in the background, having a shallow DOF really makes dancers pop out of the frame.
Other dancers, tables, and audience members will just blur into the background. Additionally, it puts the viewer right next to the dancers. Lights become blurred specs in the background and can become really nice additions to photos. You see that they are there, but the do not dominate the photo and distract from your subject. In the next entry about camera technology, I’ll tell you how you set up your camera to change your depth of field for any subject.
I am uploading the photos from last weekend’s Baltimore Dancesport Challenge now. I will update here as soon as they are ready. Thank you!
