In a course of several years I had a privilege to attend to numerous ballroom dance competitions. I have been asked by dancers and organizers of these competitions to make some pictures for them which I gladly did. I learned how to cope with low light and mixed lighting, how to compose photographs with right dancers’ postures and how to anticipate the perfect moment in their movements on a dance floor before pressing a shutter release. This time I let myself to experiment a little bit with slow sync flash and long shutter speeds. I like the results. The photographs became quasi-paintings. Instead being frozen in their movements with short shutter speed dancers in these photographs do actually move. There is a sense of movement and flow in these photographs. And I like it.

Every time I come to ballroom dance competitions and see dancers in makeup and beautiful dresses on the ballroom floor, the way they dance, move and present themselves I cannot help but think about dance as mating ritual. It is a play in which a woman can be a woman, femininity at its extreme - beautiful, gorgeous, stunning with perfectly done hair, heavy salacious makeup, bright dazzling dresses. And they can dance. What could be better? You can do things on the dance floor which are impossible to do in regular routine life. In essence dance is a sensual drama played in public. And it is beautiful. It is art.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 9:47 am and is filed under Photo Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.