Steve Losh

For those of you that don't know, one of the things I do with my free time is dancing.  I've been swing dancing (Lindy Hop) for about five years, blues dancing for a year or so, and recently started learning tango.  All of these dances are improvised partner dances and so rely heavily on leading and following.  People do make routines but at least 95% of it is unrehearsed social dancing with partners you might have never met.

As a male I'm usually in the role of leader, though I do try to follow when I get the chance.  I've learned a lot over the years so I'm going to write a few posts about leading, and this is the first.  I'm going to use the traditional pronouns to make things easier to read, but everything applies to both genders in both roles.

Beginning

When a guy is first taught how to swing dance (or blues, or tango; everything I'm saying applies to all three) he's usually taught that his main job is to lead.  This sounds obvious, but it's a lot for a beginner to take in.  He has to learn the footwork and ingrain it into his memory so it becomes automatic, which takes some time.  The next step is learning individual moves: not only how to do them himself but also how to lead a follower to do them at the same time.  It takes coordination and most of all practice.

Leading at this point involves clearly showing the follower where she should go and what she should do.  "Placing the follower's weight" is a concept that's a bit tricky but very useful.  If a leader isn't clear in his leading the follower won't be able to follow him unless she "cheats" and just does what she knows he wants her to do (because she's danced with him before and so knows what he's trying to do).  This falls apart when the leader dances with a new partner.  Without leading and following swing dancing just doesn't work, so leading clearly is the main role of a beginner guy.

Moving On

Let me take a second to explain something I see happen very often with leaders that take classes and progress nicely in their skill.  Once the leader gets the basics down pat and starts learning more moves, there seems to be a tendency to learn things that let him show off. The followers get to really shine in Lindy Hop quite a bit, so it's only natural for the guys to want to measure up and look cool themselves. Unfortunately I think this gets in the way of my next idea.

I think once a leader reaches a point where he's comfortable with the structure of the dance and has a repertoire of moves and vocabulary of movements, his role changes.  His job is no longer "lead."  His role becomes "lead the follower you are dancing with right now."

Every follower is different.  Every single one has a different level of experience, a different style, and a different personality (as it relates to dancing).  If the leader simply leads every dance the same way, those dances are not as good as they could be.  An "advanced" leader leading a beginner follower in a lot of complicated movements she's not capable of following yet turns into a complete mess.  He goes away from the dance feeling bored or frustrated (or worse, arrogant) and she goes away feeling confused, discouraged or angry.  This is not a good thing.

Paying attention to the follow's level is critical.  I'm not saying "only do moves that the follower has learned and can easily follow."  Pushing the follower slightly beyond her comfortable, "automatic" level is wonderful and helps her immensely; but going totally over her head and confusing the hell out of her just so he can show off (to her or others) is obnoxious.  This also works in reverse: followers, please challenge your leaders but be mindful of their skill.

Experience isn't the only difference between followers.  Each follower has her own style that won't always fit perfectly with the leader's personal style.  Adjusting his style to mesh better with hers makes the connection between partners so much better, which makes the dance that much more fun.  This also works both ways.  Followers are generally better at "listening" to their partner because it's their main job; if a lead makes an effort to really listen to the follow and change his leading to incorporate her ideas, personality, style and level it makes an enormous difference.

The point I'm trying to make is that "leading" a follower is not just leading.  It's paying attention to the follower and leading her.

It's been just about a year since I got my first SLR camera and started studying photography with any degree of seriousness. I've come quite a way since then, and it hasn't been exactly what I expected.

RIT has three main areas of photographic study: fine art, advertising and photojournalism. If you had asked me on the day I got my camera which of those three I thought I'd be most interested in (even though I wasn't majoring in photography) I would have said "photojournalism." When I first started shooting I hated using flash and was mostly only interested in capturing musicians and dancers.

Since then I've learned a lot. I'm pretty comfortable with hot shoe flash and studio lighting. I know how to develop and print black and white film in a darkroom myself. I've discovered how wonderful a certain degree of abstraction can be and I'm slowly but surely getting more artistic as time goes by. I think my answer to the previous question has changed; right now I see myself becoming more and more of a fine art photographer. I certainly don't consider myself good at that yet but it's the path I've started down and plan on continuing. There's something really special about planning, visualizing and not just taking but creating a photograph that I've fallen in love with.

I'm going to be updating my site to reflect this shift. Obviously the layout has changed a bit, but I've also removed the galleries of random photos that I had posted previously. From now on I'll only be displaying photographs with a cohesive idea behind them. I'll still post tons of random haphazard photos to my flickr site, but the galleries on this site will be for showing off what I most enjoy and am really proud of.

It's been a while since my last entry. Things have been pretty busy. I've graduated, started a full time job, moved into a new apartment and adopted a cat.

In the next few days I'll be revamping my site and posting a lot more.

Yesterday my new camera, a Pentax K20D, arrived in the mail. I've been wanting it for a while and now that it's here and I've had a chance to try it out a bit I though I'd write something about it.

A lot of people seem to think that getting a fancy, expensive digital camera will automatically make you take wonderful photos. This is very far from the truth. You wouldn't expect to be able to create wonderful drawings just by picking up expensive pencils, would you? Ken Rockwell does a great job of tackling this question in his article Your Camera Doesn't Matter which sums up everything nicely.

One thing in the article that's easy to miss is where he explains why good artists do use the fancy, expensive tools if they really don't matter. I'll quote the section here:

So why do the artists whose works you admire tend to use fancy, expensive tools if the quality of the work is the same? Simple:

1.) Good tools just get out of the way and make it easier to get the results you want. Lesser tools may take more work.
2.) They add durability for people who use these tools hard all day, every day.
3.) Advanced users may find some of the minor extra features convenient. These conveniences make the photographer's life easier, but they don't make the photos any better.
4.) Hey, there's nothing wrong with the best tools, and if you have the money to blow why not? Just don't ever start thinking that the fancy tools are what created the work.

I think this is an important point. The camera does matter, just not in the way most people think it does. You don't see carpenters hammering nails into boards with rocks. Sure, a rock would work but instead they use nice hammers that are durable and comfortable to use because it lets them worry less about how to work with the tools and more about what they're creating. I think the same can be said for cameras and photographers.

So back to the K20D; why did I upgrade? Yes, the increased resolution is nice (14 megapixels instead of 6). I'll be able to print much larger photos with more detail now than I used to be able to, which is good.

Resolution isn't the only reason though. The K20D is weathersealed which means that I can take pictures in the rain now. There have been a few times in the past where I could have really used a weatherproof camera so I'm excited about finally having one. It's also much more durable in general. I'm generally pretty careful with my photo equipment but more durability never hurts.

Another big reason I upgraded is having more controls on the outside of the camera as opposed to having to dig through menus to find them. Less fiddling with the camera menus means more time actually taking photos and less missed opportunities, which are definitely good things.

If there's one area I'm not careful enough in with respect to treating my equipment gently, it's dust. I change lenses fairly often and I'm not always super careful about avoiding sensor dust. The K20D's dust reduction system means I'll have to clean the sensor a lot less which will be really nice.

To summarize: a nice camera won't magically make nice pictures but it will get out of the way and let you create great photos if you're capable of it. That's the part I'm still working on.

Jam Circle

This past weekend (April 25-28) was Northeast Girl Jam in Rochester, New York. Girl Jam is a swing dancing workshop weekend that focuses on classes for the followers. It was a huge success; we had a lot of people attend and everyone seemed to have a great time. The dances had a ton of energy and the late night parties were wonderful (as always).

I took a bunch of photographs over the course of the weekend, mostly during the performances and competitions. Once I posted them I got a bunch of questions asking me how I did it, so I figured I'd write here about it in more detail. I used different techniques each day so I'll go through them one by one.

Friday

My goal for the first two nights was to get images with the dancers sharp enough to recognize but with enough blur to convey the feeling of movement and energy in the room. I started playing with this technique at the blues parties in the past and I think I'm really starting to get the hang of it.

Solo Jazz Contest

On Friday I only had one of my flashes with me, so I had to make some tradeoffs. I bounced the flash from the ceiling to get more even lighting (directional light from a bare flash is usually too harsh), but since the ceilings in Tango Cafe are so high it took a lot of power. I wound up shooting at ISO 1600 and 3200 for most of the night so that my flash could be on a lower power setting and fire faster. Even at that ISO the noise isn't really that bad since the photos are exposed well (thanks to the flash). This photo was shot at ISO 3200 and I don't think the noise distracts from the image much at all.

Swingout!

I was using a wide angle lens (18mm) so that I could get entire bodies into the frame. One of the things I love about Lindy Hop is that it really uses the entire body which this photo really shows off. Cropping off huge parts of people in every single shot makes that much harder to see. I set the aperture to about f/4 and that gave me enough depth of field to get most things in focus at 18mm. I set the shutter speed depending on the amount of ambient light; it varied from 1/30 to 1/4 or so.

Late night, back porch.

The trick that really made a difference in taking good photos is that once I set the exposure I stopped looking at the camera entirely. I didn't review my shots as I took them and I didn't even look through the viewfinder to compose. Using a wide lens meant that I could just point the camera in the general direction of the dancers and still get them. I took this photo at the late night and the camera was held against my ribs as I did.

Why did I do that? I can perfectly compose an image but if the dancers aren't doing something interesting it's going to be a boring photo. I've been dancing long enough that I'm starting to be able to predict when something cool will happen in a dance, but that only works if I'm paying complete attention to it. Messing with the camera distracts me and I can only get the most obvious moments. Ignoring the camera and watching the dancers means I can pick up more subtle parts of the dance and capture those (as well as the obvious ones).

Saturday

On Saturday I brought along two flashes to the dance and had Sergey hold one while I held the other (thanks Sergey!). Two flashes means twice as much light, which means I can shoot with recycle times twice as fast and have more even light coverage.

Carl and Nina.

Since I was able to shoot twice as many photos I was able to experiment with getting up close. Using a wide angle lens let me get most of the dancers in the frame when super close and allowed me to play around with really interesting perspectives. This photo is one of my favorites from the weekend. Getting really close to Nina means that the distance between her and Carl is exaggerated and adds to the sense of tension. Once again, the flashes freeze the dancers and the ambient light burns in a bit of blur to add some movement. This photo was also shot at ISO 1600 but the noise is definitely not the main focus of this picture. As long as you don't underexpose noise is usually not a problem in these kind of photos.

Swivel!

Not only did I try getting up close, I also tried varying my angle more than I usually do. I usually brace the camera against my ribs when taking these kinds of photos for a few reasons:

• It's a safe height that will get the whole dancer in the frame.
• My ribs are vertical and so aligning the camera with them means that it's not wildly tilted up or down and I don't accidentally get ceiling- or floor-only photos.
• It keeps the camera close to my body where it's much less likely to be whacked by a stray limb.

Getting lower and higher gives me different perspectives that can have really nifty results. The problem is that it's much harder to know if the subject is completely (or even mostly) in the frame when the camera is in an awkward position. To get a photo like this I probably shot four or five at strange angles that I deleted.

One other fun thing to notice: you can see Sergey holding the flash right to the left of her hips. I probably could have closed out the flare in Photoshop but I don't think it really detracts from the image much at all.

Sunday

Solo Jazz Class

On Sunday I shot at a few of the workshops since there wasn't a dance. A workshop has a very different feeling than a dance and so I didn't want to try the same approach as the other two nights. Instead of using flash and a wide lens I switched to a fast normal lens (my 50mm f/1.4). The light coming through the windows was bright enough that I was able to shoot at around 1/60 at f/2 or f/2.8 and ISO 800 or 1600.

Once again the noise isn't much of a problem because the photos are exposed well as this picture shows. The shutter speed is just slow enough to get some blur at the ends of the limbs but not enough to lose all detail.

Bellydancing Class

Since I was using a normal lens instead of a wide angle I had to mostly abandon the idea of getting big group photos and instead try to capture individual people as they learned. Using a wide aperture let me isolate the people from the sea of arms and legs in the backgrounds and gave the images a soft quality that helps reflect the feeling of the afternoon.

I really like the soft-yet-directional light that came from the big stained glass windows combined with the overhead lights. Lately I've been using flash a lot in my photography and it was fun to get back to using natural light. I'm going to try to practice with it more in the near future.

Overall

Northeast Girl Jam was awesome. I had a great time dancing and photographing and got to see a lot of old friends (and meet new ones). If you're sad you missed it there's another event in Rochester next month: Stompology. It's a weekend of solo jazz and Charleston workshops and awesome swing dances.

If you'd like to see the rest of the photos I took this weekend I posted them on Flickr. Feel free to comment here or there; advice/questions/comments are always appreciated!