A Belly Dance Performance

Digital original

Every now and then I get the opportunity to photograph something really outside my comfort zone, photographically speaking. When a night of belly dance performance was planned by a friend, I immediately asked if I could photograph it, and days later found myself in an underground venue, photographing belly dance for over an hour.

Digital original

In some ways, live dance photograph has a lot to do with concert photography, so it was not totally foreign, but the motion and rhythm of the dance was completely new to me. The easiest way to compensate for this was through volume, and over the evening, I fill almost every memory card I had...in JPEG format, in order to make the most of my resources. Because of this choice, unusually I adjusted most of my cameras image settings (White Balance, sharpness, contrast etc) to make the best out-of-camera images possible.

Digital original