Q)Why the Blog?
A)A couple of reasons. First it allows me to publicly document certain aspects of the community. I am sometimes touched by even ordinary decade old snapshots that have gained emotional weight simply due to the passage of time. People, venues and mores are in constant flux. Images provide a connection to the past.
Also there are many extended members of the community living in distant states or abroad. Facebook and Myspace are great but not everyone is a member. The blog is readily accessible and allows visitors and expatriates alike to revisit memories forged in and around our city's milongas.
Q) Which images get posted?
A)I try to stay reasonably current (really, I do try). After a milonga I will separate out the images designated for special or future projects (my really lucky shots). Then there are a few that for various reasons are best left unpublished but most end up in the blog or in the associated web gallery.
Q)Do you edit the images?
Not yet, at least in the traditional sense. I don't own any image editing software and cannot yet justify the purchase price of photoshop ($700, though if someone is looking for a tax write off then .....). Shooting in manual mode and RAW allows significant control over the image capture and the development process (i.e helps me to recover from mistakes). The special effects so far are all generated in camera during exposure. So my recent workflow (after having to buy data recovery tools) is as follows. Capture, download, backup, quickly develop, backup jpegs online, sort, select, white balance, curves, crop, watermark, re size then upload.
I have recently purchased lightroom to enable the cataloging of the images. I am hoping that it will shave hours (days) off the process. Seems there is never the time to learn the things that will save even more time. LR also has development and basic picture adjustment capabilities. It will be fun.
Q)What gear do you use.
A) Most of my images were shot with an ancient canon EOS 300D and the Venerable 350D. There are a number still being taken with the old G5. For those small images my trusty OLD P4 2.8 laptop was suficient. My earliest images were captured either on film or using early consumer digital cameras (one eighth of a mega pixel anybody) when you could still pack an album onto a floppy disk. Some of the most recent features a 40D.
In the field (milongas) I carry a couple of Sunpack shoe mount flashes and triggers. I would love to put up some umbrellas and softboxes butI always try to minimize the impact on the dancers.
Q)Must you really use Lights in a milonga.
A)The first several years I abhorred using flash, it seemed rude and abrasive. But then there was a time when we wore suits and jackets to milongas (and even shoes). These days many attitudes have changed and everyone now sports a flash generating pocket sized digital camera, shoot videos and upload images for the Facebook world to share. I started using flash regularly last year (2008) and liked the effect. Always mindful of the dancers I use the minimum effective power and shields to minimize it's impact on the dancers. The compromise is in using very iso's and accept the diminished picture quality. Now if I had a 5DmkII and a 35mm 1.2 and a 24mm 1.4 things might be a little different :-).
Q)Just how long have you been photographing Tango.
A)The first summer I joined the community. Ruben was still popping wheelies on his bike :-) Initially is shot more video than stills. That pattern alternated until I loaned out my video gear and settled on taking stills. The next generation of digital cameras and the normalization of HD will once again force the issue.
Q)Any word on those future projects?
A)First on a personal level I need to learn to code. Blindly copying and pasting CSS and xhtml can be a bit frustrating and slow. More to come.
Q)Do you ever label the images with the dancers names?
A)Only for the 'public' figures in Tango, namely teachers, organizers and performers. These are people who readily promote their names and interests. The regular dancers are generally not identified. This is in part to maintain some semblance of privacy. It also reflects the fact that I am absolutely terrible at remembering names (thanks again to all of you who never seem to tire of telling me your name three times a week.). Believe me, I am trying.
Q)Are higher quality version of the images in the blog available for viewing?.
A) Usually near the end of each post are links to a photo gallery and a slideshow of that gallery. There the image quality and resolution is much higher.
