The photos from the Arthur Murray 2014 Spring Freestyles are on sale until Monday, April 21, 2014. The early bird special is for 20% off all products including prints, albums, and digital files. We are so grateful to those that have come by the website to view and buy their photos. The web server has been busy shuttling files to you, and to the lab for printing. The photos will be available to view here until the end of July – it is only the sale that is expiring Monday:
So far on the blog, I have only posted about one of the professional shows so far. I will be getting to all of the others, but have been busy with many other photo projects. With the change in season, it is nice to be busy in much nicer weather outside! At the Arthur Murray studios, I know that getting all the routines ready for the Summer Showcase is in full swing. We cannot wait to see what you and your instructors put together, and hope to get your best moves in photos.
These are just a few of our favorite photos from the represented studios that attended the Spring Freestyles. It was really hard not to just go through the crazy Potomac Cup photos! These are the most spontaneous and off-the-wall photos we take. I think I will have to have a post just on these!
The use of a good cover photo in Facebook is something I have underestimated in my social media marketing. I do not change my profile photo very much. However, I am thinking that the cover photo can be changed more frequently. Hopefully it will not change how visitors recognize and remember my photography site. Recently, I used some images from my cherry blossoms photo walks to create a new cover page for my personal Facebook page. Here are the steps I used to make it.Looking through the Facebook help files on cover photos, they give the exact dimensions that the application uses:
At this time, cover photos are 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall. If you upload an image that’s smaller than these dimensions, it will be stretched to this larger size. The image you upload must be at least 399 pixels wide and 150 pixels tall.
Looking at this ratio, I know that it will be a panoramic photo – one with very long dimensions left to right compared to the dimensions top to bottom. Consequently, there were two photos that immediately came to mind:
These two were taken with the X100s which has a fixed 35mm lens. It is not very wide, and I wanted to get the entire Tidal Basin from the Washington Monument to the Jefferson Memorial. However with all the other photographers setup there at the time, I needed to work quickly. So I just made some photos looking straight ahead to the Jefferson first, then panned my camera to the left to get Washington Monument. I checked the camera to make sure there was a lot of overlap between the two photos before moving out of the way. After processing the photos in Lightroom, I brought them both into Photoshop CC which has some nice automated tools for combining photos into a panorama. This is the result:
The crazy bend in the perspective comes from the movement of the camera focal plane with respect to the horizon. Photoshop combines all the important elements seamlessly in the middle of the frame. I then brought this combined PSD file back into Lightroom because I like how the crop tool works there.
For cropping, I entered in a custom dimension of 8.51 x 3.15 to match the settings from Facebook. When you do this, your photo will look its best as a cover because there is no stretching or converting being done before it is displayed.
It has been a few weeks now since the 2014 Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles. After all the work to edit, sort the files, and get orders out to everyone, I finally have some time to look back on this event. There were many great dancers and photos we made that weekend. This is the longest break between Arthur Murray events that we cover. So we try to prepare as best we can for the event. There are always new attendees that we want to make a good first impression, so we have some of our best photographers to help, and we have all our gear cleaned and ready to go from the start! From this first post, I have selected photos from the first professional show that closed out the event – a Cha Cha by the Ashburn, Virginia studio!
Being the first of the professional shows that performed for the evening is a neat spot! The crowd is still settling down from the last general dance, and with no previous performance, the audience has a fresh palette. The song was “Come Dance with Me” by Michael Buble. These two had a lot of success in getting the audience pumped up with some awesome dancing! You can catch a video of the performance here:
If you look closely, you can see me hunched in some of the frames as I tried to keep up! A lot of people ask why I shoot from down low. Really, this is the best angle to capture any subject that you want to make larger, more heroic in the photo. From down here, it is much easier to compose a frame where they look larger than life! You would think that it would have a strange perspective, but with a lot of distance between me and the dancers, that angle is minimized, and you can hardly tell that I was as low to the ground with my camera!
