Busy Sunday today! Someone on the email list informed me that I forgot to post photos from the professional formation from the last Arthur Murray DC event. So sorry! Of course, I did not mean to leave them off my blogging list. It was on there, however just waiting its turn. And here they are! These are my favorite photos from the Salsa professional dance formation. It was performed by the Gaithersburg and Silver Spring studios. The team performed the dance so smoothly – transitioning between partners, forming lines, circles, all while
Overall it is a lot to take in when photographing formation groups. Especially with the staff performing at a professional level, there is a lot to attempt to capture. Of course they have the dance figures, but they have the added element of their body position to other couples. With this in mind, I don’t think I have a good strategy for photographing this aspect. I do love having the chance to try!
I am hoping it will be a beautiful Saturday! My assignment today is to be a second shooter and assistant on a wedding today. This is one of the best jobs as a photographer. You have to use all your photographic skills in technique and composition while trying to manage different environments, and lighting situations but from a slightly different perspective. When assisting, my first thought is not what looks best from behind my camera, but from the camera of the primary photographer. Do not be in his shot first and foremost! Then think what different lens you could use to capture the same scene so that they have a variety of photos to choose from when editing the whole day.
With the gear you are carrying, make sure you keep your eye on it – the primary photographer may unexpectedly be running to keep up with the bridge and groom! You do not want them to worry about where their things are and missing shots because of that. Finally, during posed portraits, I do not have a camera in my hands. The less cameras pointed at a group during that time, the more likely that everyone will be looking at the primary photographer’s lens. This part will take much longer than anyone, including the photographer, wants it to take.
During this time, I will see if an extra light or reflector will help, or I will try to figure out family members that need to be in photos are ready when it is their turn. It is still a busy day even if you are not the main photo person in charge! Hope you have a great weekend!
The last Tech Thursday, I posted about the Great Gatsby poster from the 2013 movie. I made myself a project to recreate the poster with our local dance studio since they are planning a party with a Great Gatsby theme this October. To start, I made portraits of all the staff, then made a background in Adobe Illustrator to place them. It was a background that was flipped and repeated so that it would give a consistent look to each of the portraits.
To come up with the dimensions for the backgrounds, I based it on a 20 x 30 image. This is a standard size for printing and framing of photos, and would be large enough to put 7 portraits on at one time. In Adobe Photoshop, you can create guides to help you line up elements in your image. So I started with a 20 x 30 image, then made guides all 14.3% apart from each other. This value comes from dividing 100 by 7, which is 14.28… Rounded to 14.3 would fill up the background close to 100% across – 100.1%, actually. Here are screen shots of how to do this:
New Guide option from the menu in Photoshop CS5
Select ‘View’ > ‘New Guide’ to create a guide on your image. The default units in this box are in inches, so change from in to %, and the guide will be placed 14.3% across the image vertically from the left.
Background Graphic Design
New guide at 14.3% of the background vertically
New guide at 14.3% of the background vertically
From here, I just selected the are to the left of the guide to get the dimensions to bring into Illustrator to create the background. Similarly, I made guides in Illustrator that divided the rectangle into quarters. I created the design in one corner, then flipped and moved the design until it filled up the entire area making the design nicely symmtrical:
I burned some of the smaller lines to make it look like they were continuing on under the larger lines. I also made a dark gradient towards the bottom of the frame to add more dimension to the background. Then I pasted the portraits on top of the background, and added them to the complete poster in my evenly spaced guides. This did take me about a day and a half to complete since I was learning a lot of new techniques in Adobe programs, but I think it came out nicely!
