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

Give monkey a camera, it can produce some very interesting image, so give human being a iphone camera, he/she must be able to shoot some interesting dance photos.

Iphone 4 back camera has 5 meg pixels, selective focus, and a large display for you to preview. It even has a tiny flash. The best part is that it is always with you.

(Daiane and I ran into this huge ink painting outside of Shanghai modern art museum. Thanks to the constant availability of iphone, we were able to quickly snap these shots, the light is very harsh and strong, I don’t think a professional SLR will do much better in this situation. Unless you use flash fill. Daiane, the most beautiful Chinese girl dressed in traditional Qi Pao, was very inspired by this painting. An on-site improv was not unavoidable.)

With iphone camera you can’t adjust aperture, shutter speed, and you can’t prefocus. Also 5 meg pixels is obviously over kill for that tiny lens and sensor. And of cause, the low light performance is no where near adequate, unless the moody motion blur is what you are after. But after seeing every photo displays the same blur, you kind of want to have to an option of getting a clear shot.

When Paco Gomes & Dancers did a on-site performance in Jao Jou Saloon in Oakland, we need to take some photos, but I didn’t have a “real” camera with me. So again, iphone was there to save the night. With some experiment, I was able to get decent percentage of sharp shorts, at least look sharp at iphone screen resolution.

I actually appreciate the simplicity of iphone camera. By limiting your technical options, it forces you to compose and plan more creatively. It makes everything more spontaneous.

Iphone camera is unique because it is always available, produces decent image quality, encourages spontaneity,  and it has a lot of limitations. I think it deserve some serious exploration for using in dance photography.

Very often, a limitation is also an opportunity for something fresh and creative. You just need to approach it with an playful mind. Like a monkey.

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)