I have been taking tango pictures intensively for more than 2 years now. Most of that time I’ve been using a Canon 350D with a number of lenses. What’s special about tango pictures? Most importantly, the tango events are in the evening/night with minimal lighting. I avoid using a flash, since it’s unpleasant for the dancers and because the pictures have very sharp and ugly lighting. Another thing is that I don’t use a tripod. I can’t tell the dancers where to move or to stand still, so I go with the flow. The fact that they move also means I need a shutter speed of 1/15s at the slowest; 1/20s is better and 1/40s is comfortable.
All these tips come down to the same: get the fastest shutter times possible while keeping the picture quality acceptable.
#1: take the highest ISO your camera can afford
If you can use sensitivity ISO 800 instead of ISO 100, you’ll win 3 stops. This is the difference between a picture at 1/40 sec (sharp) and 1/5 sec (blurry), certainly with moving targets (and tango dancers do move). Of course there is a trade-off: you loose colour detail.
This is the main reason why you’ll need a camera with a decent sensor, or in other words, an dSLR instead of a regular point-and-shoot camera. Even my 350D gets colour defects at ISO800. When they’re too bad, I tend to convert the pictures to black-and-white or somewhere halfway (by decreasing the saturation).
The camera I’m drooling over now, the Canon 5D Mk II, can take decent pictures at ISO 3200. That’s another 2 stops faster.
Continue reading ‘Five tips for taking tango pictures in dark environments’
An Baccaert wrote an article in De Morgen about Nathalie and Andrés, who are representing the Benelux in the ‘Mundial de Tango‘ in Buenos Aires. She wanted a nice picture to include with the article and came across one I made at the Tango Marathon in June.
She asked me if she could use it, and because An is a friend of mine, because I know Nathalie, because I use a Creative Commons license and maybe also a bit because I like the idea of having an image of mine in the papers, I agreed. So there it is: my first newspaper publication!
(hat tip to Clopin for getting me the PDF version!)
Resurrection of milonga.be
When I started dancing argentine tango, there were two sites that gave you an update of where and when you could dance tango in Belgium. The first one was tango.be, with a frame-based layout that I don’t find the most user-friendly nor visually pleasing, and the second www.milonga.be, with a Flash-based agenda that was quite easy to use. Unfortunately the editor of the latter had to stop the site due to lack of time. Two weeks ago I noticed that he had even let the domain name expire and it was free again. Five minutes later I was the new owner of milonga.be. My goal: to make it again into a comprehensive overview of where to take tango courses and dance tango in Belgium.
Wordpress again
Oh, what can I say, I know Wordpress so well now, I use it wherever I can. So yes, it’s a Wordpress site, with the K2 template, but with (currently) only static pages and no posts. I’ve divided the site into 2 parts: where to follow classes, and where to go dancing (practicas, milongas, salons, workshop). I’m obviously going to sprinkle some Web2.0 gold dust on the project. One example of this: Google Calendar.
Continue reading ‘Creating a tango calendar’
Published on
March 25, 2007 in
Tango.
Thursday is the start of the Brussels Tango Festival and I’m looking forward to it. This is what my schedule looks like:
I’ve also just ordered my Canon 50mm prime lens to take lots of pictures at f/1.8. Five days of dancing with attractive women, taking pretty pictures and obviously some more dancing. Sounds great!
Published on
August 22, 2006 in
Tango.
I have been looking for a way to write down tango steps since I began dancing. I experimented with drawing arrows, writing full text, abbreviations, inventing signs, … I’m not alone in this quest:
or 
And that is only when you take into account the feet. The Labanotation system (developed by professional dancers) has a graphical element for each movement of the legs and arms.
While this is probably one of the best systems around, it’s too complicated for us laymen dancers. So I decided to distill a base vocabulary for writing down tango steps: Tangotation.
Continue reading ‘Tangotation: writing tango steps’
I’ve started a public Google calendar for tango events (milonga’s, salons) in and around Brussels. My preferred site, milonga.be has gone down, the agenda at tango.be is quite ugly (it uses frames *shiver* ), and Marisa & Oliver’s agenda cannot be exported. So I made my own:
Continue reading ‘Brussels Tango on Google Calendar’
Published on
October 27, 2005 in
Tango.
I have had a tango site for almost two years now. You know how it goes, you start with collecting some tango-related links (hey, look, a description of the giro!) and before you know it, you have developed your own poor-man’s-wiki-like tango glossary. Hard to extend, hard to update.
So I thought, let’s bite the bullet and install a real wiki (MediaWiki), and drop all my tango information in there. I installed it 3 months ago, spent a lot of time copy/pasting the info while annotating it and here it is:
tango.smoothouse.com – the Tango wiki
featuring info on tango music, tango movies but first and foremost: the Tango Glossary – an extensive list of tango words, steps and figures.
Why a wiki?
The type of information I want to collect on this tango site is ideal for a wikipedia-like set-up. When you explain what the Cruzada position is, you need to talk about the Paso basico (8-count basic step), so you would link to to it. And from there you would want to link to the Salida, the Resolucion, … So you have a lot of interconnected words and concepts that all link to on another. There is no concept of a publication date (which is so typical for blogs). There is no concept of a question/answer (like forums). So obviously a wiki is the way to go.
The main advantage for me is the ability to edit on-line in a web-interface and easy interlinking ([[KEYWORD]] creates a link to the explanation of KEYWORD). Even better, I am not the only one who can edit the data, anyone can add to the site. I am of course worried by possible abuse (e.g. the standard “Help:Contents” page has already been attacked by several bots who fill it with links to dubious sites), but for now I will go with the community spirit, fingers crossed.
So anyone with some experience in tango: you too can participate in the adding/updating of my Tango Wiki! Just click “Edit” on any page and start writing!
Technorati: tango – wiki – dance
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