Salsa Dancer
A week ago I went to the dance performance of a friend with the local dance company Salsa Caliente. Salsa is a form of dance I had never seen before. I took pictures, a lot of them. Which means in several ways that I have not yet seen Salsa being danced, as looking through a view finder is not really the same as watching the performance.
This is the only photo I feel able to show since I have not got any permissions from the people involved. As this one could be any of several dancers and does not show a face, I feel comfortable publishing it without asking. Sometime I will select some photos that especially please me and seek permissions to post them in this blog.
It was a tricky night of photography due to quite low light levels, and what light there was changed frequently, had hard shadows and was coloured in one way or the other, and differently from the background.Frequently there were quite colourful costumes as well. Processing the images took a long time as a result, and many shots were really only useable in black and white, and even then that could be marginal. The temptation was to process them quite heavily. If I did go the black and white route it was usually when the background colour allowed for it to be darkened up a lot. This photo had a red background, as you can see below, and red was the most difficult background to work with since there are a lot of reds in people’s faces, and other similar tones, which can make a horrible mess of the skin tones when filtering for reds. The bottom image takes the processing to a graphic extreme, but I like how it emphasizes some of the shapes nicely, especially curve from the dancer’s waist to bottom of the picture, shaped a lot like a classic ceramic vase.
All my shots were at f1.4 with my 50mm lens which focusses quickly even in lower light, an essential part of shooting dance. A lot of cropping was needed due to the focal length. I guess this might be a situation where a uniformly fast zoom lens would be good, but I don’t have one. Thank goodness for a large sensor size which can withstand heavy cropping.
The other tricky part was figuring out when to press the shutter – lots of time it was when people were being still, at the apex of a move, or something like that. Other times it was when it felt right. All round tricky, but I got some pleasing shots and had a lot of fun doing it.
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Canon 5Dii, Canon 50mm/f1.4 lens, ISO640, f1.4, 1/160th, upper photos processed in LR4, lower in Topaz B&W Effects2.
burnt embers 
I go for the Red one too. Salsa and Red belong together. Also there is just that little more detail in the eye area in the colour shot which makes it more compelling. The final shot is very imaginative and creative but sadly it magnifies the slightly ugly shape to the outstretched hand. The technique you have used in processing works very well and I would use it again, but it’s just that tiny detail that is the spoiler. Such a shame, but we are learning all the time, and this I know would have been a tricky assignment. We learn most when we make mistakes I think – not that this was a mistake. Blame the low lighting. I bet you wanted to shout: ‘Hold it right there’ more than once!
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Thanks Andy. That hand was a bit unfortunate – it was still settling into the pose so my timing was off by a hair. That was often the case – discussing the photos with my friend who dances there are many instances where I shot just a bit early or late and either exposed poor technique, or made it look as if there was when really it was a fleeting moment. I could just clone a bit of the hand out – it would not matter for the bottom treatment. I agree about the detail in the face in the red version – that was the biggest difficulty with processing images, losing details in the dancers. In salsa there are many moments when they do “hold it right there” and that is when I took many of my photos.
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I think it would take a super-human to get this right first time out. I’d love to see what you can achieve on a second outing!
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Hi Andy. I did take some very successful shots, I just don’t have permission to post them. This one was sufficiently anonymous that I was comfortable posting without permission.
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I, too, prefer the red version because, as Joseph points out, it says Salsa. I have found that photographing a live performance is very difficult indeed. I’ve learned a few tricks along the way but I have a lot of blurry, soft focus and nasty color temperatures to show for it. Of these, color temperature is the easiest fix, especially if the lighting remained consistent through the performance. Performer movement if a tough one but your f1.4 seems to handle it well. I have never photographed dance before but I would guess that a long shutter speed can give you some very nice results if the movements are too fast for sharp focus and the background is dark, or at least a nice, contrasting color as you have here.
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Hi Ken. The lights changed for each dance number, but not too much during it. That meant I could sync some of my adjustments to multiple shots in groups. The backdrop in the middle was lit in different colours, but the wings were black and so depending on where I was pointing the camera, I ended up with several different challenges for each dance number. The 50/1.4 lens did handle things well – often it was not a long enough focal length, but it focusses pretty quickly and the shallow depth of field was great for some of the shots. It was a learning experience for sure, though the pictures I had taken of the Broken Strings band in a pub a few months ago helped me anticipate some of the problems (though in that case the lights were changing constantly).
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Actually I like the red photo. To my mind it has Salsa written all over it. The bottom photo works beautifully as a design but the Salsa feel is no longer in it. Photo ops such as this one are exciting they sharpen both hands and mind. I’ve always ended up with some hits and more misses, but for myself even the misses often are interesting. Looking forward to seeing more of this series.
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Hi Joseph – thanks for the comment. I have not photographed dance of any kind before. It was exciting, and I got a terrific response from the participants as well when I put the photos on FB – a couple of hundred of them! I will see what I can do to make a series from this outing with my camera – after all I did put a lot of work into processing which in the normal course of events would have given me weeks worth of blog photos!
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