Just a quick post today as we are going to be photographing the DC Dance Challenge today in the Atrium Ballroom of the Ronald Reagan Building. This is a new venue for us in the heart of downtown Washington, DC. It will be a new setup and arrangement for us and the organizers of the event who originally scheduled this at the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo. With the federal government shutdown, a new venue was needed. Luckily, this is another top of the line space in the area for ballroom dancing. We wish luck on all the dancers today! By next Saturday, we will have the photos posted to the proofing website for viewing. You can leave you email address here to be notified as soon as they are completed with their upload, and are ready to view:
Thanks to everyone that has visited the site this week to view the Arthur Murray Fall Freestyles photos! The early-bird sale on those images is still on-going. The 20% off pricing on that event will be good until next Monday, October 14, 2013. If you have any questions on the products available, please let me know. I have been getting lots of questions from new participants that joined us at this event.
Facts of life around DC have been challenging this last week. The government shutdown has drastically changed the way our area is looking, and there are many changes to daily life that is taking some adjustment. The Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park is run by the National Park Service. Without a federal budget, this park is closed, and no activities are able to go on at the site.
Downtown Washington, DC
So tomorrow’s DC Dance Challenge has moved to the Atrium Ballroom at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in downtown DC! This is a beautiful newer building built in the federal style to match the many government buildings in the immediate surrounding area. We are thankful that the organizers were able to arrange such a great venue in short notice! We are excited to shoot a ballroom dance event there for the first time, and of course, we’ll have the photos of the moved venue here on the blog.
The photos will definitely look different from the unique architecture and dance floor of the Spanish Ballroom, but we’ll do our best to make it look just as good in the photos. There is a lot of excitement about the competition this year, and the entries are always going up. We look forward to seeing more familiar faces on the dance floor tomorrow!
This is a controversial subject in photographic circles. “Dutch” angles or shooting with the camera tilted from being straight with the horizon is a popular stylistic choice at this time. In browsing wedding photographer websites, I see the Dutch angles in many photographers that describe their style as photo journalistic. This stems from photographers that were chasing images to make newspaper headlines more loosely composing images just to “get the shot” no matter how straight the composition.
Chasing Photos
If you are chasing a person of interest, or in a war zone, it is understandable that you cannot always carefully line up images due to time constraints, or keeping your body from danger. The first working photographers I was exposed to in my career were wedding photographers. So many of them use this technique as part of their style. They are trying to create a different angle and change how images look especially if they have been made hundreds of times at different weddings in the past. In fact, I saw what they were going for, and I really adopted this as part of my photography.
There was a stark change in my view on this practice. When I started to shoot sports photography for a news media wire service, they gave some feedback. All images submitted to them had to have straight angles. If the photo we had of the action was tilted, they asked that it be cropped to a straight angle prior to upload. If not, the image would not be accepted. The reason was that for publication, angles needed to be level with the horizon – tilted angles do not translate to things like covers or spreads that magazines and newspapers publish. In looking at my ballroom dance photos, I was surprised to see how many of my images had the tilted angle!
The first time I looked at these, I thought that the images looked more dynamic. Additionally the angle added to the excitement of the dancing action. Now, I think that these photos make me a little seasick. The walls and floors moving to one side of the image creates tension when being viewed, and not in a good way. So, I no longer intentionally tilt my camera. I try to keep angles as straight as I can. Moreover, I crop them to straight during post production if they are a little off. Let me know your thoughts on this. Do you or do you not shoot with Dutch angles as part of your style?
