dispatches

Dance Photos that Don't Suck--a work in progress

In preparation for the workshop I'm presenting this summer, "How to Take Dance Photos that Don't Suck," I've begun practicing with lo-fi camera capture. Most people don't have pro cameras and fast lenses. I want to do a workshop for the casual shooter who wants to boost their success rate. I thought it a good idea to see what that looks like personally.

I shot still photos of the dance last night with my iPhone 4. I've done video in this hall with this iPhone, and it's a surprisingly good video camera. Stills? Not so much. Even with my Canon 5D Mark II's, this is a challenging hall to take a good photo in. With the iPhone, I found the best I could do was "interesting", impressionistic images. This is what I will have to hold as the best option for the typical, badly lit dance hall.

One thing I'm learning is that it's a lot harder to previsualize your shot with an unconventional camera. I've never been fond of compose-on-the-back-of-the camera cameras anyway, as I seem to need to envelope my entire eyesight, closed off as it were, in a through-the-lens point of view, to feel like I know where I am. Camera smashed against face style. With the phone I lose that. The decisive moment is a lot harder to discern and anticipate. It may be a reason why everyone's Instagram shots are mostly of things that don't move.

Another thing to expect with iPhone dance photography is a really high failure rate. No matter how intentional you are with choosing your shot, mostly it's not going to work. A big issue is shutter lag--you have to learn to fire ahead of the shot. Which is going to limit your ability to compose it. With the show shutter speed in a dark hall, the best approach is to pan with the action and hope something looks sharp. Accept that you will suck, most of the time. I shot well above 200 photos. I threw a hundred of them out in the first edit. Maybe 10 merit further attention. You can see those here.

 I have several camera apps on the phone--Mattebox and CameraPrime, among others. I can't tell if the shots look better, but the interfaces made shooting with them more difficult than the vanilla OS camera app. In camera processing is a non-issue for me, as I'm loading them into Photoshop, but I'm going to have to address this issue in my workshop.

 Can you tell I'm at the bottom end of a steep learning curve? I'm taking suggestions for where I can get educated.

 

 

 

 

 

Stitched panoramics

This

came from these

using this

I have a long history of panoramic images as my go-to format for my personal work. I composed an entire book once, on my travels through Ireland, with largely black and white panoramics shot with an Xpan. Since shooting in digital, I have casually played with stitched pans, and sometimes post one on my Daily Photo blog.

 Last week I took delivery of a panoramic kit from Really Right Stuff that allows multiple rows of shooting to make a stitched pan. The way to do stitch pan shots right is to be on a leveled tripod, and with an apparatus that permits the camera to rotate around the nodal point of the lens. That way, when you rotate the camera, there is no parallax issue. Objects at varying distances from the lens stay aligned no matter how you move the camera. I've used a panoramic base for years that allows me to shoot a single row of images that are easily stitched together. With this 3 way gimbal setup, I can shoot up, down, and sideways, and the camera is centered around a parallax-free point in 3 dimensions. I can shoot 360° if I want.

 Although there is a Photoshop option to merge images into a panoramic format, I use a stand alone app called PTGui, which allows very fine control of all parts of the stitch process. It analyzes the component images, finds the overlapping points, and warps the images to whatever panoramic projection you choose.

 The image from 2 days ago was with a Mercator projection. In today's photo, I shot in all directions from a point under my madrona tree. Every direction was covered. I chose a 360x360 circular projection, and this is what I got. I'm just at the beginning of learning how to previsualize this format, and how to control the software to achieve something beyond a novelty shot.