A simple college arts and dance show can surprise
you with great photo opportunities.
Charlotte Rutty is spun upside down during a
Bowdoin College dance show.
The Photo
Every Fall, Bowdoin College invites parents and
family members to visit on Family Weekend and experience the variety of
activities the school has to offer. My
daughter Megan helped organize a dance performance, so we didn’t want to miss
the chance to see her perform on stage. Yet
while Megan was very excited about her own dance number, she said we absolutely should not
miss a dance where her friend Charlotte would be spun around her dance partner’s
arm.
Thanks to that tip, I was confident a
perfectly-timed photo would capture something special. However, the dance hall lighting was far from
ideal, as performers moved in and out of alternately bright and dark spots on
the stage. This required perfect timing to shoot photographs only when dancers
appeared in the lighted areas. In
addition, because the dance photos required freezing fast motion, the image
quality would be sub-par, since I had to set my shutter speed to between 1/250
and 1/500, use a very high ISO, and set my lens f-stop to a wide-open f/2.8.
When Charlotte and her partner began the dance,
they moved rapidly around, side to side and front to back, but I kept focusing
and shooting. At times, they were in the
shadows, and I knew those pictures would not be usable, but when they danced in
the brightest lit spots, those pictures looked great. The first time she was spun around in the light, I missed
timing the the shot for when she faced forward upside down. Continuing to follow the dance, they did the
spin again, and I timed everything perfectly. It
was a good thing, too, because they didn’t do it again.
3 Tips
1. College
dance shows can provide unexpectedly great photo opportunities.
2. Be ready
to compensate for frequent changes in lighting or inadequate lighting.
3. Use a
shutter speed that freezes the action, even if you have to lose some image
quality by using a high ISO.
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