I decided to get more experimental this year than last year. It's always hard to capture motion in a static picture, but I'm pretty happy with how these came out. (More for photo nerd at the bottom.)
Click on any pictures to see a larger version.
| Instructor's Jam | ||||||||
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| American Lindy Hop Championship - Regional Qualifying | ||||||||
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Technical details for photo nerds: Since last year, I got a new digital SLR (a Nikon D70) and decided to really go for broke on these pictures. Even shooting with my lens wide open and pushing the camera to ISO800, I was still looking at 1/4 second exposures. I used my flash (with a tungsten-balanced filter) to freeze the action, but let the exposures run longer to get the motion blur. For the instructor jam, I hand-held the camera, and for the ALHC competition I used a tripod. You can see the difference in the fuzzy or sharp backgrounds. I shot everything in "raw" mode and processed it all with Adobe Camera Raw (part of Photoshop CS). This let me get the color balance right and do some cropping as well. This web page began with Photoshop's "web photo gallery" feature, but I cleaned up the output with DreamWeaver. If I could use any fancier gear in the world to improve things, I'd have loved to have separate, radio-controlled strobes or a faster wide-angle prime lens. Still, I ended up with pretty much what I was looking to get.
If you want to know more, you might want to check out my guide to social dance photography.
