Several of my friends are dancing/acting in this performance. Market St has changed a lot over the one and half centuries. And people walking on the street has changed too. This fabulous site-specific performance pull the viewers right back to 150 years ago. To see more photos from this project, go to my facebook album:

Sailing Away

Answer: you will have to wait couple millions of years for monkey to evolve into next human race.

What if you give monkey a camera? Chances are you will see interesting images pretty soon. You will see images that challenge your perspective and your imagination. So often we settle into a way of “doing things” and it become very hard to see things from different angle.

To understand means we have to use our language. Language is acquired and is deeply entangled with culture and society. Our language gives our power to understand and connect, but it also is our biggest limitation. We can not even see something that we have no concept over.

To look from a different angle means to give up what we already know. This letting go is probably more difficult than learning. If you don’t believe it, try to forget what you just read in this blog. The very effort of trying to forget reinforce your knowledge of the existence of this blog. Or, maybe, try to forget your own name.

So, to help us letting go and discover something new, we might need to learn from monkey. We will have to “just playing around”, making all sorts of “mistakes”, and see what happens. This is a scary process since you have no idea what is going to come out.

Of cause, monkey have no idea what their pictures “mean”. We, on the other hand, monkey around, and “pick” those images that interest us. So are we still bounded by our language and knowledge?

That is probably why so many great artists had to be recognized long after they are dead. They happened to monkeyed into something that way beyond the understanding of the time.

Related album on Facebook

(Dancer: Olivia Eng, from Paco Gomes & Dancers)

Although you can put a infrared filter in front of the lens, this usually results in super long exposure, which is a problem in dance photography. A modified digital SLR serves much better. By putting a infrared filter inside the camera, right before the sensor, you can see what you are shooting, adjust by taking a test shot, and shooting at fast shutter speed.

(Dancers: Nina Fischer, Olivia Eng, from Paco Gomes & Dancers)

For infrared photo, you pretty much want to shoot in RAW format only. Once you bring the image to Photoshop, you will want to do a channel swapping to get rid off the red cast, and make the color close to normal. There is something mysterious about making a photo almost real, but not quite real.

(Dancer: Mari Takahashi)

Infrared turns the sky into deep dark, water into black hole, grass into dreamy white. It creates a perfect stage with dramatic light for dancers.

(Dancer: Mari Takahashi)

Infrared and dance photography seems to work very well together. Both distort or exaggerate the reality. Together they really enhance the surreal feeling. It’s like inside a dream.

The kick off event for 24 days of Central Market Arts lasted three days over the weekend of September 26, 2010 at the Mint Plaza in downtown San Francisco. Mint Plaza is a historical location. In the old days the Mint building is the place hosting the gold deposit of San Francisco. Inside the building, you can still see those heavy duty vaults.

On Sunday, students from Lines Ballet Training Program did a location specific performance using the windows on the Mint building. The students are energetic, out going and expressive. Perfect for my hungry lens.

It was in the middle of afternoon, high and direct sunlight presents a challenge for lighting. Those windows are under the shade. The light is very flat. Under such light, there is little difference between an infrared shot and a regular BW shot. But infrared adds a touch of dreaminess.

As sun dropped a bit lower, the shadow from building on the south casted a strong shadow across the wall, and lighting became very dramatic. Now, it’s getting really fun.

I had a Canon 5D and a Rebel XS with me for the event. Picked up Rebel XS just the day before from craigslist as a back up camera. But I found myself using Rebel XS most of the time because of EF-s 10-22 lens I had with me.

Many photographers like to use long zoom. The most popular lens for sports and wild animal photography seems to be canon 70-200 f2.4L. In fact this is THE lens that converted many photographers from Nikon camp to Canon. What this lens does for a photographer is to pull the subject close to him/her, and gets very personal. The experience amplifies when it’s up close and personal. Well, what if you can physically get up close and personal? That is exactly what 10-22 does for you. I love this lens tremendously for it’s call to get physically up close and personal.

When you shoot with this lens, you are so close to your subject that you have to be physically part of the action. Things gets very unpredictable when shooting that way. But that is the fun part of a creative process.

To see more photos of this event, go to my Facebook Album.

What made Dance Photography difficult? Well, like sports photography, dancers are usually moving very fast, unlike most sports photography,  dancers changes direction frequently and unexpectedly, and yes, the light is usually very dim, and change very fast.

Difficulties in dance photography includes: hard to focus, long shutter-lag (due to focus time), too many things to think about, auto exposure easily fooled by the background, lighting changes too fast, not enough light to stop the movement, etc.

The more frequent compliant is that the photos are usually come out fuzzy. My solution to that is pre-focus. My equipment of choice is Canon 5D with 50mm f1.4. And I shift focus from shutter to AE lock button using CF. This allow me to anticipate the location of action, pre-focus and fire away without shutter-lag.