Dance Photography

On of the things I believe will be the most challenging in my project is getting nice photos. the photography I'm mostly familiar with is portraits and even then im definitely not an expert. In my double page spread I want to focus on a woman who does musical theatre. Considering that the most experience I have had with dance/performance photography is taking about 5 photos of the school's production Lion King freshman year for Journalism 1, I was pretty concerned. In order to take a nice crisp photo I need good lighting which in auditoriums is usually pretty bad for photography. Or I need to figure out how to work with low lighting environments. In order to gain more information and start practicing this I looked up videos on Youtube.


This video made me consider doing my photos in locations other than an auditorium. I think this would work if my magazine was strictly for dance but I think since I'm focusing on musical theatre a stage would still work best so emphasize that its theatre and not just dance. Despite this realization, I did learn lot of valuable things from the video. These are some of the things I learned:

• use shapes
• Using shapes will help add a lot of interest to the picture
• capture the complete movement
• I need to capture the full extent of each movement especially if it's a jump.
• have the performer check their technique in the pictures
• This is one of the things that stuck out to me the most in this video. Especially since I don't have tons of knowledge on dancing. I can't or won't know what the performer needs to correct.
• decide if I want to capture a crisp shot or have blurriness in the picture
• have the correct camera settings
• I have a camera but I don't completely know what settings I should put it to, especially since I will be shooting in a place that most likely has low lighting. I need to do research and play with the settings on my camera to figure out what will be best with my location.

Holler Magazine

The second magazine that I chose is Hoot magazine which is a feminist magazine created by students at Columbia University. This magazine is about feminism in fashion, particularly pertaining to New York. This magazine publishes an issue twice a year: once for fall/winter and the other for spring/summer.

The technical and design elements I noticed are:

• strong emphasis on photography
• the photography is very artistic and not commercialized

• they overlapped the photos

• font for masthead is curly and in all lowercase

• many pictures are shot from low angles

I definitely want photography to be a focused part of my magazine. I want to try and add as many artistic and original elements to the photography as I can. I was planning on the photos being from low angles to make that subject seem more powerful. Overlapping the photos is something that I hadn't thought of doing but I really liked the idea and I want to try it. This magazine really made me realize how much work I have to put in to planning the design of the photos.

The Siren

Diving deeper into the genre of women empowerment I wanted to do more research into the technical and design elements of specific magazines.

The first magazine I chose is The Siren magazine. This magazine is a feminist magazine created at the University of Oregon. The content of this magazine includes topics like art, love, and anti-violence and how they relate to feminism. In addition to this, they also create issues of the magazine about intersectionality, for example their latest issue was about people of the LGBT community.

The technical and design elements I noticed are:

• color scheme throughout the magazine whether it be in cover image, page color, text, or illustrations

• quote relating to the topic of the issue

LGBT issue Love issue  

  Art issue

• cover image is often very colorful and the font used for masthead is a very straight font
• there is also an absence of cover lines in many issues of the magazine
• includes topic of issue

• the table of contents is often really simple 
• some have pictures, some don't 

• within the magazine they have stories with pages with only text and then some with only pictures

I really like the use of color schemes within the magazine and its something I might consider using in my magazine. I also really like the font they used for the masthead because typically women's magazines have a very delicate, curly font, but the straight bold font makes a much more powerful statement. the idea I. have for my magazine is to do an empowering magazine about women in work places and the different issues will be different jobs. The job I want to do my project on is women in theatre. I definitely want to include the topic of the issue on the cover. For my magazine, I want to do a much more engaging table of contents than The Siren by including more visually interesting pictures.