Yesterday morning found me heading out of the house sometime not too long after 8am — horridly early for a Sunday morning — so that I could head down to the Crocodile to hang out with the Dance Off Seattle crew and shoot the dress rehearsal. With roughly a half-dozen teams to get through, we got started at 9am, and spent the next five and a half hours or so letting each team run through their routine a few times while I ran around the floor snapping off shots.
Y’know, it’s amazing how heavy a D70s can get after a few hours! I’d picked up a flash sync cable to allow me to run my flash tethered to the camera (while the D70s/SB-800 combination allows wireless flash syncing, the pre-flash trigger sequence introduces a bit of delay that using the sync cable removes), so I ended up shooting nearly everything with the camera in one hand and the flash in the other. It doesn’t take long at all for that to turn into quite a workout!
While I’m going to be one of two photographers for the actual show, the second photographer couldn’t make it to the rehearsal shoot. Since the organizers of the Dance Off are also contestants, they made sure to stay out of the rehearsal space while the other teams were practicing, so that none of the teams know what the others are doing. This has put me in the rather interesting position of being the only person in Seattle who’s gotten at least a hint as to what each of the different teams are doing, and let me tell you…
…this year’s Dance Off is going to be awesome.
(All photos, of course, will on embargo until after the show — no spoilers from me, kids!)
If you didn’t make it to last year’s Dance Off, I’d suggest hitting the videos page on their site, or checking out Propadata Films‘ video podcasts of all of last year’s performers, available either as an RSS feed or through iTunes, and there’s also my photoset from last year. Some of the same teams are returning, some new teams have signed on, and all of them…well, they knew that they were going to have to bring it. And oh, it has been broughten!
And as I mentioned before, last year was sold out and people had to be turned away at the door. The Crocodile looks to have a larger capacity, but don’t delay too long — tickets are only $7, and you can snag them online now. The show’s this Thursday evening, Aug. 2nd at the Crocodile. Be there!
My wife would appreciate the technical photography details more than I would, but I’ll take your word for it that the equipment gets heavy after a while.
Have you considered writing down (and then embargoing) your impressions of the groups at rehearsal, so you can compare them with what happens at the actual event?
P.S. I just wrote a long post about Google Analytics, but I realized that most people don’t care about Google Analytics, so I encouraged them to read this post instead. But if people don’t like Analytics, don’t like dancing, and don’t like photography, I can’t help them.