Technique for Dance Photography

Dan Wallach, Rice University
Originally April 2002
Updated March 2005

Many people have asked me questions about how I take pictures, particularly pictures of dancers. Here are my thoughts on what you need to do decent social dance photography. Note that, while this advice is targeted to digital cameras, most of it applies equally well to film cameras.

• You must have no fear. You have to get close up, which means standing in the middle of the dance floor. You have to keep your dancing brain active to avoid people plowing into you, and you have to choreograph inside your head to predict what your target is doing so you can be prepared. While you could experiment with zoom lenses to shoot from a distance, you will likely find that, on a crowded dance floor, other dancers get between you and the couple you are trying to photograph.
• You need semi-automatic adjustments. The example pictures that you see on my pages were taken with relatively long exposures (1/10 sec.), with pre-flash (fancier cameras also support "rear curtain sync", which fires the flash at the end of the exposure -- but with long exposures, you can't control where the dancers will be at the end, so it's hard to work with rear sync). That gets you the nice blurry-but-sharp effect, and also gives your pictures more warmth (i.e., more red tones from the incadescent room lights to balance the blue tones from your electronic flash). The cheaper digital cameras don't give you the adjustments you need.
  
• You need an external flash. For starters, built-in red-eye reduction often doesn't work, while moving the flash unit away from the lens works every time (red-eye comes from flash light reflecting off the retina; if the flash is away from the lens, the reflection goes away from the lens as well). As a bonus, you can shoot longer distances (built-in flashes can barely go 2-4 meters), and you can bounce the light off the ceiling (if it's white and isn't terribly high). External flashes can be fit to a number of popular "prosumer" cameras, including the Canon G-series. Of course, they work great with D-SLRs.
• You can benefit in a big way by putting a "gel" on your flash. The picture on the left was taken using just the built-in flash on my Canon G2 (no gel). I corrected the image to make the dancers look mostly right, but the people in the back (who are illuminated by the tungsten-filament light bulbs in the room) look orange. The picture on the right, for contrast, was shot with my Nikon D70 with a tungsten-balancing orange gel on the flash. The people front and back are all illuminated the same. The filter gel "corrects" your flash from its normal "daylight" balance to match the tungsten bulbs in the room.
  

• Get a tripod. Both of the above pictures were taken by hand-holding the camera. While the flash will create the "freeze" of your foreground subject, your background gets blurred. Maybe that's something you want. But, if you want the background to be stable, then you need to stabilize the whole camera. Here's an example that puts it all together. (A tripod is virtually useless in a crowded dance floor, but it's great for competitions, where you can stake out your space and not have to worry about getting bumped.)
• You need lots of storage space. I have an two 1GB CompactFlash cards. With my Nikon D70, I can fit 200 raw images (around 5MB per image) on a single card. When you've got enough space that you never have to worry about running out, then you can take lots of pictures and choose your favorites later. Shooting in "raw" mode is a big win because you can fix the color-balance, exposure, and a variety of other issues later on in Photoshop (more on this, below). Raw images give you more flexibility than JPEGs.
• You should take classes on photography. If you're uncomfortable with talk about film speed, exposure, aperture, strobes, much less composition, lighting, and simply learning how to "see", you can study these things. Even if you plan to be a digital photographer, a class using analog film and darkroom printing won't be wasted on you. Adobe Photoshop was very clearly designed to mimic the tools and techniques used in darkrooms; it's just faster and you don't need any dangerous chemicals.

Prices have dropped enough that you should seriously consider a digital SLR cameras like a Nikon D70 or a Canon Digital Rebel XT / 350D. Relative to the smaller "prosumer" cameras, you get faster frame rates (3 frames per second), faster autofocus, and a variety of accessories that you can add later on. When the action is moving fast, that additional speed is a big win. Most of these cameras are available with "kit" lenses. I've gotten great mileage out of my Nikon 18-70mm kit zoom. It's bright, it's fast, and it's versatile. Particularly for dancing, I tend to shoot with it on the wide-angle end, so try not to let a camera shop talk you into a cheaper lens that isn't as wide-angle.

Some advice on composition

• First, here's some advice I've heard attributed to Ansel Adams himself:

  The most important tool in the darkroom is the trash can.

  While you should take many pictures, you should only show people the ones that you really like. Don't be discouraged if you only get one good picture out of every fifty that you take. With digital cameras, pressing the button is virtually free, so shoot first and ask questions later.
• One of the effects that long exposures give is the experience of motion. You can also achieve this effect by freezing people in positions where they are clearly doing a dynamic move. Aerial moves are an obvious example, but you can also get this effect when dancers are strongly counter-balanced or in the middle of a "normal" step. Here's an example.
• You need to get the faces of the dancers. A photograph of the best dance move in the world looks less exciting when you have the back of somebody's head in the picture. On the other hand, a photograph that has people's faces can look great even if they're not doing a fancy move.
• Don't be afraid to shoot from unusual angles. If you have a digital camera with a rotating screen, you can easily hold the camera high above your head and point down at the dancers. Or, you can hold the camera at your waist (or lower) and look up at the dancers. If not, just hold the camera over your head and press the button anyway. Maybe you get a good shot, maybe you don't. Give it a try.
• Even for outdoor pictures, it is still important to have a camera that lets you adjust the exposure. Traditional point-and-shoot cameras take every picture with average depth of field and average exposure. You really want to go to the extremes: fastest exposure and minimal depth of field (to frame the dancers, and blur the background), or extremely slow exposures with maximum depth of field (which may require a tripod, letting you capture some motion blur). If your camera doesn't have these adjustments, you lose. Without a tripod, you can also use a flash, even outside. That can help with those longer exposures, and it will also fill in the shadows.
• Take more than just dance action shots. Take standard group shots of people smiling. Better yet, take advantage of dancer's natural goofiness. If you tell people to pose in a certain way, they will, no matter how much it will embarrass them later. Here are some examples from a costume party:
  
• Go look at art by "real" artists. Dancers have fascinated artists as far back in time as you wish to look. From primitive cave paintings through Greek vase painting to French impressionism, artists have recorded dance. Some of these pictures can captivate you. Don't be afraid to experiment with your own art.
• Make pretty web pages. Many people use automatic tools that generate HTML to frame their images. If you write your own HTML (or perhaps use a fancy tool like DreamWeaver), you can produce more attractive results, using text and color around your images to better frame them and tell a story. As a general rule, you want your web pages to load fast for people with slow network connections, so you should have pages with "thumbnail" pictures (mine are something like 220x180 pixels). When you make the JPEG images for the thumbnails, you can control how large the files are by lowering the JPEG image quality. The thumbnails you see on this page are only 6-8 kbytes, each. Likewise, when somebody clicks to see the larger image, you can control the quality of those JPEGs. I try to keep my large JPEG images between 100 and 150 kbytes, which looks quite good at 800x600 resolution. Lately, I've been using Photoshop's built-in web page generator as a starting point, and then editing the results by hand with DreamWeaver. It's not quite as beautiful as hand-made pages, but it's a lot faster.

Using Photoshop

There are many books on this subject. Buy one and read the whole thing. Here are some recommendations:

• Photoshop Color Correction, Michael Kieran, Peachpit Press, 2002, ISBN 0321124014.
• The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers, Scott Kelby, New Riders Press, 2003, ISBN 0735714118.

The Kieran book doesn't cover all the newest features in Photoshop CS, but it's just amazingly detailed in all the ways you can clean up color issues. You may not need it all on day one, but it's a fantastic reference book. The Kelby book (and lots of others like it) introduces some of the crazy new Photoshop CS features and covers a wider array of techniques.

Touch up

Many images have small "bugs" in them. If your picture came from film, you will have dust spots and scratches. If your picture came from a digital camera, you may still have "hot pixels" or perhaps just a distracting food stain on a shirt. In Photoshop, the "clone tool" lets you trivially fix these bugs. You do not need to make a picture be perfect, but fixing these little bugs can remove distractions from the beauty of the photograph.

Color adjustment

Even when you're shooting with a digital camera, the color recorded by your camera is often less than perfect, especially when you're shooting at night or indoors. Your camera tries to compensate for this, but it doesn't always do a perfect job. In the old chemistry days, this would take you hours of careful tweaking to fix, and you were limited in exactly what you could and could not easily fix.

In Photoshop, you just just use Adjust Levels. Let's pretend you had black & white pictures to keep it simple. Adjust Levels shows you an image histogram and gives you three sliders. You get to say "absolute black is here, absolute white is here, and 50% grey is here." By dragging three sliders, you get to fix you contrast and brightness and gamma response, all in a nice, intuitive fashion. It rocks. You can get even more detailed by using Curves. To master those, you really need the Kieran book as a reference to guide you.

Even better, when you shoot "raw" images, then you can use Photoshop's amazing Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), introduced as part of Photoshop CS. ACR is amazingly flexible. With a single click, you can point at somebody's white shirt and say "make this be white". You can easily make all the most common tweaks you might want to perform (fixing brightness and contrast, sharpening the image, filtering out noise from your camera sensor, and plenty more), all from one simple interface. Even better, you can get one picture right, "apply" the settings to every other picture you took at the same time, and then use a batch action to convert them all to JPEG at once.

(Tip: you may want to get yourself a cheap "grey card" that you can use for a reference photo. I have WhiBal plastic card-set that does the job nicely.)

Image size

My Canon G2's native size is 2048x1536 pixels. My Nikon D70's native size is 3008x2000 pixels. I import these pictures, at full resolution, into Photoshop. I do all my adjustments at the full resolution, then shrink to 800x600 only at the last minute before publishing on the web. (Photoshop's "Web Photo Gallery" does all of this for you, automatically.) Why the change in resolution? Every time you modify an image, particularly by adjusting contrast and brightness, you're throwing away a certain amount of information. To see this, use "Adjust Levels", make a drastic change to an image's gamma (moving the middle slider), select "OK", then use "Adjust Levels" again. The first time, the histogram was probably smooth. This time, it has many spikes and lots of blank stuff in between. Those holes are grey-levels that your photo no longer has.

When you shrink the image after you're done adjusting it, you'll notice the histogram is again smooth. This gives you the highest-possible quality for your final web page. (In case you're curious, this same effect happens with audio recording. This is why digital recording studios use higher resolution when mixing than is available on the final compact disc.)

Cropping

Some photographers make a habit of always showing you their entire photographed image (in the analog world, they might even include the film edges with the sprocket holes in the final print). But, nobody ever said it was required. Often, you can improve a picture by cutting stuff out. For this picture here, the sides had nothing particularly interesting (some people standing around). By cropping them away, you can focus the viewer on the subject of the photograph.

Another note on cropping: when you do this, your thumbnails will not necessarily all be the same size any more, and laying them out on a Web page naively will look unattractive. If you go look at this cropped photograph in context, you'll see how I matched its width with the picture above it in the same table layout. You should also consider that, for your thumbnails, you could crop further, perhaps focusing only on the faces. This would let you shrink the images less, preserving details like facial expressions. Likewise, for strongly vertical pictures like this, you could work with a page layout that doesn't require space for the tall, vertical element.

Thanks to Danil Suits, Paul Dandurand, and Marty Lyons for their help and feedback on this document.