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!
This upcoming Monday, there are 9 past 2013 events that will be removed from the proofing website. It has been fun to go through these old events to find some exciting images to post onto the blog! I meant to come back to these images sooner, but had so many other photos to share throughout the year, that I did not find a slot for these until now. If you want to see the expiration dates and events, please visit the proofing site here:
It has been great to have so many photos to share, and lots of content to write about in these posts. Writing it down in this format has made me more accountable as a professional photographer. It has given me a push to keep shooting photos, to keep improving each time I make images, and importantly, to give me a concrete goal to work for every day.
Undoubtedly writing the blog has made me a better editor! I try to limit the amount of photos in each post. I could just throw up 10 images in each post and write a few sentences. There are a few blogs that I follow in which this is the case, so I wanted to do something different. Also, limit the amount of photos so that only the very best are featured. That is one of the secrets of pro photographers – if you only show the best of the best, it makes it seem like EVERY photo you take is amazing! The also helps me to home in on the best images when I’m shooting, so there is not a huge number of unusable photos that need to be edited after the event.
I think there is progress from doing this blog so far, and I already have a list of ideas that I want to do this year with my photography. Some will be done at events, and some I will have to schedule outside of these. It will be interesting to see a few months from now how many of these I will complete! Again, visit the proofing site before the expiration of events.
The Pre-Season NFL football games have begun indicating a quickly ending summer. From my one season of trying to photograph football from right on the field, I learned much about photographing sports – football specifically, and I learned about other applicable photography skills that I could use off the field. In researching how to better photograph the practices and the games, I visited lots of blogs, watched online videos and slideshows. One sports photographer that made an impression on me was John McDonnell.
Football Photography
At the Washington Redskins training camp, preseason and a regular season game, I had the opportunity to meet and watch Mr. McDonnell work as he covered action on the field. He has been a sports photographer at the Washington Post since the Superbowl years. You can view his images at the Post every day as the season unfolds both online and in the paper. I was not the only photographer that kept my eye on John’s shooting position! He is in the perfect position to capture the action more than most. I learned that there is always something that would be good capture to more complete the story of the game. This can be both on and off the field – there are coaches, trainers, people in the crowd, players on the bench – so much to get, that you have to keep your eye to the camera before the moment passes.
Attending an NFL football game in person is designed to be overload the senses. Trying to capture this event in camera is a challenge that definitely takes years to be comfortable doing season after season. Not only are the thousands of fans adding to the frenzied action, obstacles on the sidelines to avoid, but American football is a game of inches! Keeping track of the ball – who has it, who is getting it, and the game situations that could affect where the ball is going next keeps everyone on their toes.
Thankfully, I will concentrate on photographing ballroom dancers. They have a much easier environment for photographers to work, but they have their own challenges. You should always keep your eye to the camera – dancers always make for fun moments to capture!
