Harvard Radcliffe Modern Dance Company | Performance Photography

This is the Harvard Radcliffe Modern Dance Company at their year-end performance. Great job! See here for more!

Harvard TAPS | Performance Photography

Harvard TAPS put on a show this past weekend – I shot their dress rehearsal. Great job everyone! See more photos here

Harvard Identities | Boston Event Photography

Harvard students working it! Check out more photos of the resulting Identities fashion show here

Expressions | Boston Event Photography

I love my new camera.
Check out more photos from the Expressions Exodus performance here

AADT Eastbound 2009 | Boston Event Photography

The wonderful women and men of AADT put on two sold-out shows this year for Eastbound 2009, and their performance was spectacular! I had taken over 1,000 photos, so you can imagine how hard it was for me to pick out some favorites to display. When I select dance photos to display, I focus on the following things (after considering technicalities such as sharpness, color, exposure): 1) composition – how are the dancers composed in the frame? 2) emotion or action – does it capture the essence of the dance? 3) artistry – did it pick a good frame of the lighting design? 4) Does it have a lot of people? – in the larger gallery you’ll see some more singles, usually because if you happen to be in the front of the dance you are photographed more often, but I like including large groups for display just so people don’t feel left out.

Every person who puts on a dance show – you know how important it is to design your lighting well. Sometimes I even approach the lighting designer myself to offer some suggestions or to at least understand why lighting was created in a certain way – hip hop dances for example tend to have really fast-moving lights, which are really a feast for the eyes, but very, very hard to capture for a photographer (I’m not complaining, I welcome a challenge)! Lighting not only conveys the mood you want for your dancers, but also, poor lighting design means you can’t see the performers – in person or on film! For even the best cameras, if your lighting is too dim throughout the dance, your photos and video won’t come out clear. My suggestion to all lighting designers is that there should at least be a 20 to 30-sec segment of your dance where you utilize white spotlights on the dancers – your background can still be colored, but your dancers need to be illuminated.

on to the photos!

See more by clicking here!

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