3rd Annual Belly Dance Photography Marathon

This week ended my 3rd Annual Belly Dance Photography Marathon, which occurred mostly during the month December 2008 here in Silicon Valley. This month consisted of a gala show, one belly dance festival, and 10 separate studio photo shoots. This year my Marathon studio photo shoots were more selective, a trend I'd like to continue with into 2009.

I prefer to work with belly dancers who are seriously dedicated to their art, because that disposition very much matches mine, and so working together is much more synchronistic. The year before, for the 2nd Annual Belly Dance Photography Marathon in December 2007, I was playing "catch up" for numerous photo shoots that had not been possible to schedule. So in December of that year, I photographed some 45 belly dancers, though most were in two troupes. I did not want to repeat that so much, preferring to work more deeply creatively, and with fewer dancers rather than more.

Another thing I did this last December 2008 was force myself to use new lighting and other aspects of the photography. I did my first ever High Dynamic Range (HDR) belly dance photo, a technique surely of value for incredible skin tone results. Over this Holiday break time, I've also been improving my imaging skills, and have been learning the Adobe CS4 tool suite in more detail, as well as LightZone, and some other specialized digital skin care software. As part of this learning, I discovered that Photoshop CS4 has a method similar to the HDR technique for extreme depth-of-field.

I used the Lens Baby 3G for the first time in the studio, for the Cleopatra photo of Aazura Nour, below. I also did variations on my "Goddess Inner Light," which can be seen in the angelic photo of Mychelle, below. Lastly, I discovered a whole new vista, how to do a one-light Chiaroscuro lighting setup, and it worked fabulously well, shown in the photos of Eve, below.



Aazura Nour: Pink-Orange



Aazura Nour: Cleopatra



Mychelle: Angelic



Mychelle: Seated Lovely



Eve: demure



Eve: black-and-white



Eve: Virabadrasana

More on Belly Dance Legends in New England

One of the real treats from the second Belly Dance Legends of New England photo shoot this Fall was getting to see and hear live musicians who play in the area, often for belly dancers. Apparently, there is a quite a music scene in the New England area, and the musicians are very good.

The gentleman playing oud in the photo is Mal Barsamian, who is a very well known musician. I was so privileged to hear him play for a gig we had to travel quite a ways from Boston for. He made really beautiful clarinet sounds that I'd never heard before. After several hot sets playing the clarinet, he picked up the oud and wailed on that for many songs, it was incredible.

One of my 2009 belly dance goals is to understand the music much better, and of course learn a lot more about the musicians who have contributed to belly dance.

I was also privileged to photograph several belly dance Legends at this second photo Belly Dance Legends in New England photo shoot. Here are a couple of photos of the lovely Saadia from this photo shoot.