Stephanie came by the studio the other day to get some head shots and a few dance pictures that she needs for an up-coming audition. I love these two dance pictures. Flinging hair and a dancer jumping will never get old. BTW, no trampoline involved on the second picture. She can just jump like that on the spot. Pretty cool.
I love living in Cedar City. For being a smaller community, we have a wide variety of arts, sports, entertainment, and outdoor activities available to us. There is always something going on at Southern Utah University, sports, music, art shows, dance, etc. My wife and I have season tickets to all that the College of Performing and Visual Arts has to offer, and we attend most events. Then of course we have the Utah Shakespearean Festival, which is always fantastic. But, in addition to that, we have organizations like the Cedar City Junior Ballet, who annually put on a full-length ballet production. They just finished their production of Cinderella and it was fantastic. If you didn’t see it, you really missed out.
I was able to photograph them during their final dress rehearsal. The full galleries, including studio rehearsals can be found here. I’ve put together a slide show of some of my favorites here on the blog. I have to say the the step sisters are my favorite. Chris and Lise do such a fantastic job, they are a hoot to watch. They cracked me up every time I saw them perform.
(note the slide show requires flash and may not appear in your blog reader, so jump over to my site to see the slide show)
Cinderella wasn’t just a pretty face. She was smart too.
I’ve been shooting photos at the Cedar City Junior Ballet’s rehearsals of Cinderella. The photos were used for promotional material and the program for the ballet. This photo I had to share because it just struck me as funny. In the opening scene, Cinderella starts out sitting on a stool reading a book. The audience just sees the outside cover of the book which appears to be just a pretty book. I was shooting right next to her and glanced over and saw this photo. I chuckled inside. I said to Cinderella, “reading a math book huh?” She replied, “yeah, I opened this book and thought ‘how am I supposed to read this?’”
A few favorites from the Cedar City Junior Ballet’s final studio rehearsal. They moved into the theater on Monday and perform this Friday and Saturday nights. We will have the official photo call at the final dress rehearsal. I can’t wait.
Twice a year I get to design a poster to advertise the Canyon View High School dance concert. In the past I’ve just pulled a dance photo out of my archives to use on the poster. I have a bunch to choose from. This concert, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to do a photoshoot specifically for the poster. So, I took my white seamless to the school and we had a quick photoshoot. I really mean quick too. We did one pose. I took maybe 8 frames. That is all we had time for, but that is all we needed.
I have had the opportunity to photograph many dance concerts over the last few years. This is all because of my wife. She is a dancer. Currently she is the dance teacher at Canyon View High School, this is her second year there. In addition to taking photographs, I have done a little bit of graphic designing. Mainly dance concert posters and programs. Again because of my wife. I enjoy doing it. It is fun to do something totally different, yet not completely unrelated to photography.
I just completed this year’s spring dance concert poster. Yes, the dancer in the poster is one of my photographs. Normally, I don’t like to take my photos and completely destroy them like this, but sometimes it is necessary. In this case, the high school has no budget to print a good quality, full color poster. What ends up happening is a master copy is made, and then someone takes it to the high school’s copy machine and reproduces hundreds of copies. An actual photograph looks like crap when run through a copier, so simplifying it like this gives it a fighting chance. Also, dance photos tend to use a lot of black ink, so they appreciate it when I design something that is a little less ink heavy.
The main goal here is to create something that will grab the attention of someone passing by and immediately say “Dance” in their mind and give them the pertinent info.
Here is the original photograph.
