We planned on a out door photo shooting for Sunday Oct 24. But the weather turned ugly on San Francisco and forced us to shoot in Studio 2 at Lines Dance Center. It was dark inside. I debated about using flash vs using available (low) light. Looking around the studio, the huge window facing market st provides such a beautiful background and a even backlight, making it very hard to resist.

The key in high key image is not so much about the amount of light rather than the quality of light. Yes it is a dark day, but the white interior of the studio provides a even illumination. Since the sky is much brighter, I knew if I put the model in front of the window, over expose the sky, I can get a nice high key lighting. Thanks to modern DSLR technology, ISO 1600 used to equal to highly grainy image in the film days, now it is very acceptable. So set the ISO to 1600, and throw the lens wide open (2.8) and off we go.

The window light is heavenly, and the models are just like angels. They turned out going really well together. Even in a sunny day, the light inside the studio is dark, so a common urge is to use flash fill. With a flash fill, you can get a much crisp image, and “correct” color. The problem though, is that the highly directional light from flash kills the heavenly mood from the window light. I used flash last time with Saki with this same backdrop to get a dramatic mood as well as matching the exposure to the interesting building outside. This time however, I want a beautiful dream kind of mood. So flashes stayed in camera bag.

There are several challenges for shooting high key image in low light. Mainly it’s hard to get faster enough shutter speed to stop the motion, overexposure of the background washes out the contrast making it difficult for lens to render clear sharp lines, and good skin tone is very difficult to achieve.

Like so many things in life, you have to look for the opposite to achieve a balance. In low key image, you look for strong light for drama, in high key images, you look for dark area and lines to define the image. Megan’s dark dress worked superbly in this lighting by providing an anchor to the images, so does Jackie’s hair color.

Photography is very much a discovery process as well expressive process. It is always a joy going into a session without much expectation and say things starts to grow.

On Facebook Album

Carmina Burana was composed by Carl Orff in 1935 and 1936. It is based on 24 of the poems found in the medieval collection Carmina Burana (from Latin, means “Songs of Beuem). This collection was mostly written in 11th and 12th century, found in 1803 from a monastery.

Excerpt from some reviews from the show:

From Catherine Pawlick of CityDance: “In all, the troupe’s warmth and emotion were palpable from stage to audience. That Labayan has put considerable time and thought into this production is readily apparent. Feminine strength is highlighted here,
and what better vehicle for it than generous, truthful movement that expresses the range of gifts on offer from the fair gender. “Carmina” is powerful, gritty, and inspirational, a true gift to Bay Area audiences.”

From Stark Silver Creek: “But by far the real highlight of the performance was the lead dancer for the piece, Brazilian-born Daiane Lopes. Her movements were powerfully dramatic but controlled and crisp, her lines were evocative and well-suited to the music,
and her eye contact and facial expressions were intensely dramatic, engaging, and powerfully evocative. Her various solos were real tours de force, especially “Circa Mea Pectora”. ”

From SF Bay Guardian: “The women’s physical stamina was as impressive as their contagious energy. They moved through everything from extremely fast-paced jumps and leaps to slower, more lyrical, classical ballet poses with zest and playful charisma. Nothing seemed too difficult or too grand. Incorporating classical ballet, folkloric dance forms, and more sensual modern movement, Labayen’s elegant and exciting choreography emphasized the women’s versatile strength, but it was the all-female cast of badass dancers that not only brought Carmina Burana to life, but ultimately brought the admiring audience — screaming and stomping — to their feet.”

For more photos of the event, see the Facebook Album.

While I was documenting Sailing away on market St, I was fascinated by the people walking by on street. Who are they? Where are they here? What do they want? Where are they from?… Questions are endless.

Once you start looking, each person is so unique and interesting. And each corner of the street is filled with stories. I decided to document them. Not to cause attention, I mostly “shoot from hip”, and not worry too much about technical controls like composition, exposure, etc. The result is a set of photos that surprises me almost in every shot. It shows me how much I didn’t see while walking around the street, and how much I would have missed had I shot in a controlled manner, i.e., using my “sounding judgment” in taking photos. Each unplanned lighting and angle reveals some story behind. To preserve that sense of surprise and discovery, I choose to not processing and not weeding out much on those photos. They are presented like a mirror ball with many small facets, each reflects it’s own angle of the reality.

This post might not seem to be directly related to dance photography, but it  is reflects my thinking about how to break boundaries in making image of  dancing, those boundaries imposed by our own knowledge, experience, and  aesthetic preference.

Some thoughts,

Can we really make right choice for our future in life? Some research has indicated that the best choice is actually made by ask people who is old and has had a lot of life experience.

We want to think that we can make right choice if we just think hard enough. But the situation is such that we rarely have all the necessary information to help us making decision, not to mention that future is highly uncertain. Some study in project development shows that, as you spend more time to plan ahead, the quality of planning initially will improve, but levels off at certain point. After that, surprisingly, the quality of planning goes down as you spend more time. The reason? Giving the uncertain nature of the future, there is probably not enough information available for making a more detailed plan. So insisting on more planning is just fooling yourself.

The software industry discovered this in a painful way. At first, engineers thought they had full control of the future. The process choice for software development at the time was called “water-fall-model”. First, you do all the background research, then decide what you want to build, then make a perfect plan, then assemble, then test, then deploy. It all sounded very good except that you can never really know enough to make that perfect plan, unless, if you are the engineer god, Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak. What happened to most of the project was that major risks were discovered late in the development, and the whole thing has to start over again.

Engineers are quick learner. So the industrial process standard of today is called “Agile Process”. In this process, you no longer need to make that perfect plan to get started, you just need to have a OK plan, then you go, constantly re-evaluate and adjust your plan as soon as you have any major new information. This process acknowledges the fact that software making is a creative  activity, so its process is as much an art process as an engineering process.  When you make a piece of art, you usually don’t have a clear idea of what you  are making, often you don’t have any idea at all. The piece you are making  slowly takes on it’s own life, and you are there to help it grow. Engineering  process, on the other hand, appears to have a clear goal as well  as functionality requirement. This has been proven to be an illusion in modern  software development.

So, letting some control go during a creative process allows room for newly available information to be incorporated. How about making itself. Do we really know everything to make every choices? We are probably limited more by what we know than what we don’t know. It took revolutionary thinking for physicists trained in classical physics to accept quantum physics. We usually see what we are looking and hear what we intend to hear. Much of the communication difficulty among people is not because we don’t
speak the same language, rather because our brain is highly selective in processing the information.

So, is there a way to help us to break this limitation imposed by our own intelligence? This experiment suggests that if we let our control go, we might actually see more than we normally can. The world is full of fresh and interesting things. It’s just we always wear strongly colored filter glasses and only allow us to see certain spectrum.

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

(Copious Dance Theater)

Yes and no. Creativity is about discovering patterns that previously haven’t been noticed. It means breaking the rule. So it is about creating freedom. And yet this freedom can not exist if it is too free. Complexity theory tells us that a system that is totally random is as complex as a rigid system. For example, imaging you have a bunch of sands in a box in a 0 gravity space. The free flowing sands represents a total randomness. Naively, we will think this is the most complex condition. But because each sand has no relation with the other, the total complexity (entropy) is the same as fixing them on a regular grid pattern, which is them simplest configuration.

Now, imagining each sand particle starts to interact with it’s neighbor in certain way. Suddenly emergent pattern will occur, and the whole system will display high order behavior that is not possible if it is totally random. We see those effect in life all the time. Snow flake, flower, water wave, sound wave, or ultimately life and human being.

(Labayen Dance/SF)

Those interactions between sand particles is a limitation on how the sand can move. Without those limitations sand particle will just move on it’s own mind. Those limitations made higher order behaviors (wave, wind, life) possible. So that is a very good hint on our human creativity. Our creativity can not exist in total randomness, or total freedom, it’s own possible when there is some sort of limitation.

(Paco Gomes and Dancers)

When I shoot dance in a dark theatre, I found the own lens works well for me is 50mm 1.4. I have tried other lenses, like 24-70mm 2.8L. 35mm 2.0. 85mm 1.8. Somehow I always come back to 50mm 1.4 + EOS 5d. This has became a game for me. In how many different way can I use a 50mm standard lens? It turned out I benefit greatly from this process, a self imposed limitation.

(Paco Gomes and Dancers)

50mm gives the most normal perspective on a full-frame body. The image it produce is the most natural to eye and thus least dramatic. It forces you to find drama and story from composition, angle and light. This has been a great exercise for me every time I take it to a theatre. How can I find the essence of dance through a 50mm lens.

(Labayen Dance/SF)

There are some unexpected benefit of limiting myself to a single focal length. Since I don’t have to (can’t, really) zoom to change composition, I can easily pre-visualize the scene before picking up the camera. Which allows me to react to dance much faster. Dance usually happens very fast. 1/10th of second often determines a good photo from a useless one. Know when, where the action going to happen, and how the composition will be like before looking through the lens is a huge advantage in dance photography.

(Paco Gomes)

Of cause with the modern camera technology you can shoot 8 frame/sec with a good camera. Which means as long as you keep shutter pressed you won’t miss a shoot. Well, imagining the time spent going through all the photos. Also consider the fact that a good (and unique) moment in dance performance comes often as a surprise, unless you are very familiar with the dance, or, are satisfied with common dance leaps, arabesque, attitude, etc.

(Dance Wright Project)

So who is the father of creativity. I think it’s the desire to create. With out the drive to create, a limitation is just a limitation that frustrate you.

(Paco Gomes and Dancers)

On a side note, limitation is a important part of creative process, it also make a strong influence on the baby created. Imagine driving a race car on desert bed, or racing a hummer against race cars on race track. Or, just imagine having a ballerina doing a funky hip hop move, or asking a fantastic street hip hop dancer to do a triple pirouette.

(Paco Gomes and Dancers)

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

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.

More often these days, dances are performed in a environmental setting rather than on a stage inside a theatre. We have so used to quietly listening to a concert or watching a ballet inside a magnificently built theatre, and never realize that this is rather a new setting for enjoying music and dance. Traditionally (hundreds or thousands of years ago), there was no boundary between performer and spectators. Everybody is a participant. And professional dancers and musicians didn’t really existed at the time.

As human society evolves over the past few thousands of years, skills and jobs are becoming more and more specialized, so does music and dance. Slowly dance (or at least part of it) became a profession, and spectators became more and more passive. In fact, jumping up and down to express your joy while watching a dance performance is considered unacceptable behavior.

So dancing in a environmental setting is kind of going back to it’s tradition, except there is still a clear boundary between performers and spectators. Nevertheless, it pulls the audiences so close to dancers, that they receive a heightened experience that not likely to be possible in a theatre. Unlike in a theatre though, there is not a acceptable code of behavior for audience on the street.

Sometime breaking the boundary is very much the same as going back to the tradition.

(Above photos are from Kunst-Stoff dancing on Market St in San Francisco, August 2010. Dancers in the photos are Daiane, Chin-Chin, Daniel)