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!
We are finalizing our plans for the first ballroom dance event for TimeLine Media this year. We are returning to cover the event for the Penn Latin and Ballroom Dance at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This is an event that we first covered in 2009 when we were very new to photographing ballroom dance. Like us, it has changed and grown, and we look forward to this year’s event!
The last times we covered this event, there was so much energy in the room from all the dancers! With many college team in attendance, there were many friends cheering on their teammates. There were also some flags in the crowd to represent the sections from each school which makes the event unique compared to most others that we cover.
Venue
It will be held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, a venue which we have not been to previously. I hope to get in there early to get setup lights, and get an idea of where we can position to get the best photos. My style has changed much since the first time we went up to cover the event, but I’m interested to see how things have changed for me – both in lighting, and in composing photographs. I did use images from this event for a long time in my portfolio, and I hope to get more this year.
Event Details
With a full day of dancing scheduled, I’m estimating between 6000 and 9000 photos which will take about a week to process. Hopefully I can still post some blog posts during that time! To keep up with details as the competition approaches, you can follow the competition on Twitter – @UPennClassic13
After I finish editing the photos from the event, I will post them to the proofing site where I put all my other ballroom dance events- http://proofs.timelinedc.com
