Mixing Celtic harps with flamenco dancing sounds a little weird. Surprisingly it went together better than I imagined it would. I guess it also helps that you have a dancer as beautiful as Fanny Ara onstage.

All the flamenco shows I’ve shot have been loud with multiple singers, furious guitar picking and strumming, hand clapping, and often percussion. This one was much quieter with perhaps the loudest instrument being the castanet… So I was somewhat reserved in my shooting so as not to annoy too many people with my shutter noise. This was not a show to unleash a 9fps shutter blast. I’ve always thought about investing in a Blimp to muffle camera noise during quiet shows but those instances are so rare that I’ve always put it off. Also, I just can’t imagine shooting anything where the lighting changes quickly and to an extreme degree and having to open up the case each time to change camera settings. For now, I guess I’ll just have to wait until Nikon comes out with a mirrorless EVF body…

I shot this incredible concert that brought together several music and dance groups that were influenced by the African Diaspora. There were four groups crammed into the one night and I almost wished that the concert could have gone on for much longer. There was just so much diversity and excitement.

The lighting for this show was pretty dark. Most of the time I was shooting at 4000 iso at f/2.8 with a shutter of around 1/100. To make matters worse, most of the lights were colored or gelled yellow! “White” light or a normal tungsten balanced spot was non-existent. Even a white balance of 2k in post still had a pronounced yellow cast. Argghh.

The first group performing was an Afro-Cuban group called Sandy Perez y su Lade. The dancer had this machete that he was furiously swinging about which of course makes for a great photo. I spent most of my time during this set concentrating on him.

This photo is of Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco. This almost looks like a zoom effect but was actually created by a slow shutter speed and the way the dancers happened to be moving.

Aguacero brought the bomba, Afro-Puerto Rican music and dance. I shot one of their shows before and they were great again. I just love watching the dancing and drumming develop right there on stage according to their interaction.

De Rompe y Raja ended the show with their great performance of “Las Lavanderas”.

And to end the show…

Here are some photos from a recent shoot for a museum exhibit marketing manual. The exhibit was great and so were the kids who were the models for the shoot. I had originally planned on using a small Dynalite power pack and head with a shoot through umbrella which I would wheel around the exhibit. I was also shooting tethered to a laptop. That all lasted about a half hour before I had to give up on that idea in favor of mobility. It would just not have been possible to cover all the areas and the kids in the time I had available. It was time for dual camera bounced flash mode or simply available light as in the photo above.

Luckily there were plenty of neutral colored walls to bounce flash off of and the space was not that big. I had to shoot at iso 1000 most of the time to pull in enough ambient light. Luckily the D3’s files are just so clean that I have no worries about shooting even at 1600 if needed. All shots were taken with either the 24-70mm or the 70-200mm 2.8.

I’ve been a little lazy about posting lately I know. I’ve been wrapped up in a video project that still has a ways to go. I’ll post a small clip sometime in the future…

Anyway here are some shots by the group Aguacero, an Afro-Puerto Rican bomba music and dance group. I really enjoyed this show. There was a lot of movement, great rhythms and fantastic singing. This form is very improvisational. The dancers will move how the drum makes them feel and with their movements, call for accents or beats from the drummers. There’s this great interplay between the dancers and drummers that was really cool to watch. It makes me want to try learning this music but I already have too many neglected instruments as it is. There’s never enough time in the day is there?

This show had constantly changing light levels, often to an extreme degree, and dancers that would go in and out of spotlights in the matter of seconds. Many times there was no chance to adjust exposure so I just shot and figured on making some adjustments in post. Sometimes it really amazes me how much you can pull back the highlights of the D3 images and still have something usable.

I left my iso at 3200 and f/2.8 with a shutter speed that varied between 1/100 and 1/200 sec. Most of the shoot though, I concentrated on capturing motion blur of the dancers. For those I brought my shutter down to around 1/10 to 1/40 depending on the speed of the movement.

f/2.8, 1/80, 70-200mm at 200mm, iso 3200

Dohee Lee gave another great performance at her work in progress show “Deep Sea”. Sight lines at this venue were rather limited so I tried to isolate performers in the frame and relied heavily on the 70-200mm. I thought about adding on a 1.4 converter to get in even closer but the loss of a stop would have been too much. I was already shooting at iso 3200-4000 and could only get a max shutter speed of 1/125 sec.

More photos after the jump…

f/2.8, 1/15, 70-200mm at 90mm, iso 500

f/2.8, 1/80, 70-200mm at 200mm, iso 4000

f/2.8, 1/125, 24-70mm at 52mm, iso 4000

f/2.8, 1/20, 70-200mm at 110mm, iso 400

f/2.8, 1/4, 70-200 at 130mm, iso 320