Take Two ... a second time.

I had the opportunity to shoot the Take Two dance show this past Saturday night. It was my second time shooting, and as always, the dancers put on a great show which led to some fun shots. 2 hours, small theatre, 400 shots. I was being picky about my shots, only using the 8 fps of my camera on a few occasions.

A bit of history... last year around this time, my friend Didier asked me to shoot a dance show with him. Having never really done it (neither of us) we were up for the challenge. Take Two is a local group that raises just enough money each year to put on 1 dance show. They are all graduates of a high school dance program, and some of the older graduates decided to form Take Two. Great initiative, so I'm all for supporting them via photography.

It is funny how much we can grow or change in a year of doing a hobby. I remember when we showed up last year, we were all focused (no pun intended) on the settings of our cameras and where we would shoot from. Didier had showed up early and taken shots during rehearsals so we could know what we were facing in terms of light and exposure. He had a list of routines the group was doing, with the number of dancers per routine so we could prepare our lenses ahead of time, or at least have an idea of what was coming up. Yeah, I know, totally over prepared, but when you are new at something, always better to be over prepared than under prepared! I was shooting with an XSI, had 4 lenses with me and ended up taking about 700 shots.

Fast foward 365 days later. We meet up again at the same place. Instead of his huge assortment of lenses, he has a 50mm f/1.4. I brought along three lenses, two of mine and a third that I rented and was considering buying, but wanted to compare to my current lens. I had a 10-22mm, 28-75mm and a 24-70mm (the renter). Aaaaanyways. We chatted a bit about how it was last year and laughed at ourselves. The plan this time around? Do whatever. We each went to one side of the stage to ensure max close ups of the dancers on either side, but that was pretty much it. The shoot went fine, had a great time. While I shot half as many images this year, I had more keepers and spent less time processing, which in my eyes, is the way to go. I was happy to have rented the 24-70 instead of buying it. It is way more expensive than my current lens, similar image quality and sharpness, but a faster auto focusing. Not worth the extra coin.

So looking back, after a year of shooting, my thought process while shooting has something changed. I tried out some thing with my wide angle lens and love the results. And while I had some great shots from last year, I had some interesting shots this year.

Click here for a link to the set of images from this year, and here for the set of images from last year (both links point to the respective flickr sets).

These first two images are where I was playing with a wide angle




And some of my other favorites from the show: