Amy Blake’s Academy of Dance Recital—No 1

A few weeks ago, I photographed Amy Blake’s Academy of Dance Recital that was held at San Jacinto Junior Collage.  I was more than blown away by both the quality of the dance and the theatre.

Let me put a plug-in for Amy Blake’s Academy of Dance.  Amy and her instructors are top notch people—the type of people that you want to teach your daughter. 

This was a true learning experience.  At the beginning of the performance, I had my camera set on aperture priority, ISO in auto adjusting mode and auto white balance.  I quickly learned that these setting would produce little more than bad photos.  I played around with the settings and finally settled on ISO 3200-6400, manual mode, f/4, 1/250^th of a second and white balance set to 3850.  These setting generally got me in the ballpark!  I did get too much blur on some of the dancer’s jumps, but that is one of the problems photographing fast moving subjects in low light.

A big problem photographing something like a dance recital is the changing light—both color and intensity.  It took me a while to make sure that I shot when the dancers entered various lighted areas.  This did limit some of the shots that I got, but it did improve my success rate.

Today’s photo is totally about the dancer’s movement.  Overall, there is very little blur—virtually none in her upper body, but some in her lower legs.

Enjoy

Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 135mm, ISO 5000, f/2.8 at 1/250^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:

Lightroom 4—applied Nikon Vivid preset during import, set white and black points and added clarity, sharpness and vibrance and cropped image.