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.
