Bellydance is interesting to shoot. As I got used to shooting in extremely low light – I like to call it no light – I gained a little appreciation for the challenge. Especially the potential for some great, if very low key, exposures for b&w. Not so much for color. Thei performance had brighter lighting, if sometimes a sum of overlapping color lights. I’m sure this made for a much better video – and the color jpegs were perhaps a little better. But for b&w it was on the whole worse. The lead-in shot here is April Monique (Burril). It came out pretty nice – with a couple of hard hours work. Then lighting shifted to overlapping color, leaving dramatic lines of separation across her person when converted to b&w. I could dial the four main hues, moving among extremes. I love the look captured below – and something of the effect, one of dozens to choose from dialing the color sliders.

Actually this could be seen as more in line with the Halloween theme:

Naimah fell into a little more even lighting – though I prefer earlier shots of her emerging dramatically form almost no light, with the black wall background of the Black Box at the Opera House.

Megan & Brittany do an interractive dance:

These have been added to the front of the local Hafla folio HERE… even as the next Hafla is being scheduled for this winter – at the State Theater. The last one there was a fantastic show. And there I can be guaranteed the full challenge of low, bad lighting – what is becoming my favorite and specialty. And this time I have an updated weapon at my disposal, expanding my comfortable exposure range to iso 51,200 when needed.