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.