Some photos posted from the Smooth & Standard heats from the USA Dance Mid Atlantic Championships. These photos specifically were made at the 2011 event held at the Bethesda North Mariott Conference Center. At this time, it will be the site of the event again. For the most part, it is a great venue to hold this event – lots of space for dancers and spectators. As I have noted other photos from this event on previous blog posts here. We are excited to be going back in light of both the participants and the venue.
UPDATE – Now that the photos from this event have been uploaded please visit the proofing site! It was a long weekend, and the dancers showed off their talents out there. If you have any trouble finding your images, please reach out! On account of the large number of images, I am sure there were some mistakes. Additionally, it may be difficult to find your photos in all the folders. Thank you!
On this occasion, I wanted to post more of my favorite ballroom dancing photos. These were at the American Star Ball held at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, NJ. Comparatively, this is a beautiful ballroom for dancing. In fact, this is likely the longest ballroom that I cover. With this in mind, you can really separate the dancers from the background.
Additionally, this room has a tall ceiling. Similarly to the aspects of the long room, a tall ceiling will also blur a background when the dancers are closer to my position. As can be seen in the photo above, the ceiling elements are nicely blurred. The theater lighting, the chandeliers, and the cloth added to the ceiling do not distract from the dancer forms.
While working on updating my marketing materials, this photo above was chosen to be printed. Being that this is the American Star Ball, the predominant Red, and Blue tones in the dresses matched appropriately. This year’s event will be May 17 – 19, 2013. Check out other photos from the event from this previous post. Have a great weekend!
These photos were from a dance company studio shoot at Union 206 studios in Alexandria, VA. This took place at their previous location in Old Town. The studio was set up with a white cyclorama wall that gives a lot of flexibility when photographing portraits, couples, or larger groups of people. The cyc wall makes a very clean background to shoot against much like shooting against paper or vinyl backgrounds. I found that shooting against this wall was very easy. In this case, there was no trampling on the background materials, no fear of the background falling. Additionally, the light was really even across the frame.
Dance – Studio Photography
Most of the photos were three light setups. In the photo below, I had one light overhead lighting just the background wall. In addition, 2 lights on either side of the dancer. This lighting is good for male subjects which highlights edges of the body. It brings out more detail and pops the subject out from the background. Looking at the image on the blog now, there is quite a falloff of light on the left of the frame. I should have seen that and adjusted either the background light or the position of the camera. Or I should not have been lazy and fixed it in Photoshop before posting!
In this photo I experimented with some of the colored gels that were available at the studio. This was a one-light setup with a monolight covered with a blue gel. I pointed the light to fire on the background only, with a flag to minimize the spill of light onto the dancers. With the blue gel on the light, it probably would not have been flattering, and probably confusing for the viewer. The light is on the background only so it makes a nice silhouette for the dancers as they make some moves that become nice graphic shapes as the subject. If I get the chance to try this again, I would like to try another light in front without a gel, but with a grid, so that I could get a little light onto the dancer’s faces. It would be a different goal for the image, but would be a great promotional pieces for dancers looking for something different. Hope you enjoyed the images – if you have a need for similar images, let me know!
