Why do I look for the hard photos? Because all the easy ones are taken.
I mean this specifically in terms of shooting in a dynamic, difficult environment, like the contra dance floor at the Folklife Festival. I’ll pause in my own dancing for several sets, get my camera out of the checked backpack storage in the back, and figure out how to do yet another contra dance photo that I haven’t seen before.
I’ve been photographing the contra dance scene ever since I started dancing, back in the mid 80’s. The contra dance section of my website gets the lion’s share of the site’s traffic, hundreds of hits a day. Now that the business is flush again I’m thinking about reviving my notion of a big national sweep of the country as a dance gypsy, and finally making that book of dance photos.
I am at the head of the center set in the Roadhouse. A couple hundred people are on the dance floor. People are in motion, grasping hands, swinging, balancing, moving back and forth in long lines. A contra dance, though, has only so many elements, and they repeat after 64 bars of music. I’m watching the structure of this particular dance, looking for a repetitive element in the way the dancers are moving, and how that works in the frame. There’s a lot of thinking involved in this, but a lot of responding on that other level, the what-feeling-am-I-having-in-my-body sensation, and that is what I want to channel here.
Technically, here’s what’s going on. I want a slow shutter speed to get the ceiling lights to drag all over the frame. A lot of the time they’ll drag over the important part of the picture. In fact, most of the shots will look just awful. I’m using a flash, so that will freeze some of the action. I want to use a fairly high ISO so that the flash exposure will be modest and won’t blast a big burst in the dancer’s face and annoy them any more than I already am. I also stay out of eye level with them, and I shoot from below.
My f stop is pretty high, about f/11, so I don’t have to worry as much about focus. The autofocus is not up to this situation, so I turn it off and pick a manual focus point. My shutter speeds are around ¼ of a second—I’m going to get lots of motion. I’ve set the flash on rear curtain sync so that the motion drag is behind the subject as it moves. What I’m finding, as I shoot, is that I have to anticipate where the photo is going to be a quarter of a second before it happens, as that’s when the flash goes off.
Hands, lots of hands. This dance has a lot of balancing with other people in it, lots of grasping of hands. That's the photo, I’ve decided. I get in the groove of the music and the dance, and I release the shutter (panning with the action, blurring all those lights) way before people grasp their hands. By the time the flash fires, they’re connected.
With digital, I can bang away at this forever, or until I feel full with this shot. I am not looking at the LCD every time to decide if I’m done. That screen is too seductive. You want to examine every shot, but it’s crucial that you don’t or you’ll take offline the part of your brain that is engaged with the moment and seeing the photo. I glance at the screen after a half dozen shots to see if I’m anywhere close to anything interesting, or to see if I’m blowing the shot by massively underexposing or overexposing it. I’ll make course corrections, but I don’t use it as my main source of information. I think of the LCD as the rear view mirror I glance at while I’m driving.
The dance ends. I check my camera, and get back on the floor.
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