The picture above is one of my more recent shots. It was from my yearly showcase session this past spring. I cannot tell you how loud this was when those shoes dropped, and we tried it a few times to make sure we had a good shot. This one was fun!

In 2018 - I can't really remember how it happened, I ended up with the Nutcracker studio session. I planned for it by buying a few cloth backdrops that would eventually be sewn together (after setting the session up in the studio), and a set of cheap fluorescent Cowboy Studios continuous lights. I only had a basic idea of what I was doing for this. I needed a space large enough for dancers, their costumes, props, and multiple people. 2 10ft wide cloths worked perfectly, but working with a cloth backdrop is my least favorite thing to do. it's hard to maintain (wrinkles) and, to me, just isn't as good looking as a solid paper or vinyl backdrop. For this, it worked fine. In the future, I moved to standard paper rolls - not nearly as wide and I often need to extend backgrounds for dance poses, but it just looks so much better.

Over time I was adopted as the regular photographer for both the fall and spring shows, with a few comp team your YAGP sessions thrown in. Through the years I've experimented with and upgraded lights, cameras, and editing styles. Besides the 2018 canvas, the default backdrop has always been white. While popular for pictures, this personally is not my favorite color. It's clean and fine and makes for nice pictures, but a company called The Picture People - popular in the 90's - just ruined the white backdrop for me- that was their look. Every picture I see with one just screams Picture People to me. To get away from this look, I started mixing in grey backgrounds as well as light experimentation. Over the years I've come up with a pattern that I didn't necessarily plan to do. The fall ballet sessions are usually on grey, the spring showcase sessions are on white. One of these days I might go off the board and use something completely new. For now, this works.

In addition to the regular show sessions, I've also taken on some smaller session every so often for dancers doing YAGP or other competitions, and somewhere along the way, I've become somewhat of a headshot photographer. More on that next time!