6 December 2015

We discovered this venue on the same street as the Picasso Museum.

We booked the early evening show. Even though the audience was sparse the dancers and musicians performed with great emotion and energy. They were very friendly and professional. One advantage to me as a photographer was that I could freely walk around the room changing my angles and not get in peoples way. The dancing was very fast moving and I had to work quickly.

The lighting was very difficult to work with as well. It was a very dark room and one single stationary spot light. The dancers moved across the stage from darkness to bright light then back to dankness. I used spot metering  (to avoid overblown hightlights) and had the camera shooting at 9 fps.

I kept my iso fixed at 6400. I could have gone higher but I would lose precious dynamic range and colour information. Many of my shots were at least 2 stops under exposed but I managed to recover alot of detail and colour thanks to the D3s large sensor recepticals. There was a bit of noise though (mainly because of the under exposure) but this was reduced using Nik software (D fine).

Because I was impressed with the emotional intensity of the performance I also made a series of Black &White studies to illustrate this .

And, how many times have you seen real Flamenco dancing in B&W , let alone in colour?

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