It is less than a month now until the USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships! It will be the first ballroom dance event of many that we have planned to cover in 2014. I am starting to line up some assistants to help shoot, and am ensuring all my gear is ready for another busy season.
The venue for the ballroom is beautiful inside and out, giving the competition a high end look without too much added decoration. These collages were made from some of our favorite images from the 2013 event. Their portrait orientation make it more difficult to show off online, so I made the triptych from similar styles of dance.
It is nice to see so many fine tuning their dancing for the national competition later in the year. There is still some time to get entered into the competition, and to get tickets to view all the action. Visit the Mid-Eastern Chapter of USA Dance to get information on the event as the deadlines are coming up quick. We hope to see you there soon!
From the post about starting with flash, I did get a question about how this affects the camera metering. Great question! As a review, the meter in the camera measures the amount of light that is reflected off your subject. When you shoot in manual mode where you specify the aperture and shutter speed of your photo, the in-camera meter will tell you whether or not your settings will produce a good exposure. A good exposure is or an overall 18% gray image.
The computer in the camera does not know anything about the subject you are photographing. Moreover it does not know what you are attempting to do. So it takes all the data from dark to light that is coming into the camera, and it spits out a scale. Where on the scale it meters will show you what your current settings will give you. If you are in the minus side of the scale, your overall image will be dark. However, if you are on the plus side of the scale, your image will be bright. The question came in from a recent image I posted from a product shoot where I photographed the viewfinder with my iPhone, and the scale was all the way to the minus side! Were my photographs all too dark or underexposed?
This is where you need to add the flash, and the meter that is built into the flash can take over. If you are using the through-the-lens or TTL metering of your flash, there is a pre-flash burst that fires as you hit the shutter button. In that small time, this burst will be enough information for the flash to take in the scene, like your in-camera meter, then dial in the right amount of flash to add for a good exposure. You do not have to do any calculations or adjustments, the speedlight will do all that for you! This is one of the reasons these small units are so powerful. In quickly changing circumstances such as a wedding reception, or indoor event, you can turn in different directions very quickly and keep making flashes without changing your settings before each photo.
Just like using your in-camera meter, however, there can be some drawbacks. Depending on what you have in front of your lens, you may get over-exposed or under-exposed photos. Again, the camera cannot make any decisions on how you are composing your photo. It just sees dark and light. This is the reason why there are so many flash bulbs that will fire at the start of American football games – the cameras in the stands just see that light needs to be added to the scene. Why will using flash in this instance not work at all? I’ll post about that soon!
Today is the last day to view and order photos from these 2013 events. They had previously expired, but were renewed prior to the holidays. Afterwards they will be removed from the website to make more room for 2014 events. If you have any questions, or need any help finding your photos, please let me know! The website for all the photos that are expiring, and the others that will still be viewable is:
These event will be going back into the archive. It will be $40 to have the photos retrieved and re-uploaded to the website later. Thanks to everyone that has visited our website over the holidays to review their images. We are so happy that many of you have found images that you want to have hanging in your house, or posted all over your Facebook pages. We hope that you continue your dancing, and we catch you on the dance floor again this year!
