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.

#2: take the lightest lens you can afford

You need a lens that will let in a lot of light, that allows you to use maximum aperture. Your standard kit lens that goes from f/5 to f/3.5 probably won’t do. You will need a better lens and it will probably cost some money.

I started with a Canon fixed 50mm f/1.8. Contrary to what I said before, this is a cheap lens (about €100). It’s a great portrait lens, but it is hard to get a tango couple from head to toe in a picture, you’d have to step back too far (50mm on a dSLR is slighty ‘tele’). It’s great for abrazo (embrace) pictures of the upper bodies.

For the last Brussels Tango festival, I bought a Sigma fixed 30mm f/1.4. It’s pricier, heavier but it fits the purpose better. The f/1.4 lets in more light (it’s a 1/3 stop ‘faster’ than a f/1.8) and the 30mm lens (which, on a digital SLR that does not have a full-size sensor, is equivalent to a 45mm lens) allows me to fit people full-length into the frame.

The drawback: with wide aperture, the depth-of-field becomes very narrow. This means: you focus on something e.g. 1.55m away, and every thing closer than 1.40m or further than 1.70m is already blurry. While this is also a feature (it’s a great effect for portraits up close), this means that if your autofocus is just slightly off, everything will be blurry. The error margin is very narrow.

#3: choose Av or Tv mode

Obviously you’re not going to use the standard ‘portrait’ or ‘landscape’ mode. You should go for either aperture priority “Av” or shutter priority “Tv” mode. The first one allows you to always use maximum aperture and get the best shutter speed that you can. The second one would make sure that you use reasonable shutter times for moving subjects (like 1/20 or 1/40 sec).

I prefer using “Av” and fixing the aperture on f/1.4. I take risks with that, because sometimes I end up with pictures with shutter times of 1/10 or 1/5 sec, but with some luck and good timing, they come out OK. It’s just my default “gimme all you got” setting. I don’t use “M” Manual Mode because I don’t have the time before each picture to decide how much aperture/shutter I want.

#4: use autofocus on 1 (central) point

Put your autofocus on 1 point, I use the middle of the frame. This is important because you want to control on what part of your frame your camera tries to focus. You have to force yourself to the following sequence: focus, reframe, shoot. The point on which you focus will be one with the most contrast. It might be an upperarm, where the skin and clothing touch, or the face, or some pattern with contrasting colours on the back. People who are fully dressed in plain black (and there are a lot of those in tango) are very hard to auto-focus on. The framing you use to focus and the actual frame you want to shoot will seldom be the same. So you need to reframe right after focusing. You focus by pushing the shutter button halfway and then you keep it pushed like that while you reframe. When the composition is right, you click all the way and the actual picture is taken.

This is the main reason why people unfamiliar with my camera have a hard time taking acceptable pictures with it. They point at a dancing couple, they push the button all the way immediately, the camera focuses on something in between the two dancers -typically a far away wall- and the shot is unsharp.

#5: underexpose and fix it later

If the 4 tips above still don’t make your shutter times acceptable, try using exposure compensation (the AV+/- button). I sometimes use a full stop of underexposure and I correct it in ‘post’. I use the contrast maximisation in Picasa to stretch the histogram again.

Also, in tango venues, there are a lot of spot lights (to make it cosy). If I focus on a dark part and then reframe to something that includes some of those lights, they might end up clipping part of the picture. When I underexpose, this becomes less of a problem.

The drawback of this method is very similar to using high ISO values: it messes up your colours. So in a lot of cases, you might have to make the picture black and white. But if the moment, the composition was valuable, and the shutter speed was just good enough, you can still end up with a really nice picture.

So how much does this all add up to? If you were to take pictures with a compact camera: f/2.8 lens, ISO 100 and shutter time of 1/30 sec, you need a lighting situation of EV 8 (40%). In my situation, a f/1.4 lens, ISO 800 and the same 1/30s shutter allow me to take pictures in a EV 3 (20%) situation a.k.a. “very dark”. I just won 5 stops. With underexposure, I can go lower still, to EV 2. It makes a lot of difference.

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Enjoy the beautiful French animation movie “En Tus Brazos” about how nothing can stop a tango dancing couple … not even fate. It abounds with creativity, sentiment and argentine tango.

Directed by François-Xavier Goby, Edouard Jouret and Matthieu Landour. France 2005
(via tangobaby)

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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!)

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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.

Tango Calendar 2.0

One of the cornerstones of the site is the agenda/calendar. Most tango instructors keep some kind of agenda on their site (sometimes last updated in 2005), Marisa and Oliver keep an up-to-date agenda for most of Brussels and tango.be has an agenda for Flanders and Brussels. All these initiatives are separate, not connected and not always up-to-date. I considered some better alternatives:

SCENARIO 1: every tango teacher/organiser keeps a calendar that supports syndication, let’s say, Google Calendar. They add their own events and I find a way to merge all this data together. This is when I found out there is no library available for merging vCalendar/iCalendar feeds. By the way: have you ever seen that format? It’s like someone explained XML in English to a Frenchman and he asked a German subcontractor to develop it. (Actually, it’s a standard from 1998, so we can forgive the authors for not using XML)

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T035959Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
END:VEVENT

Some of the tango places do more than just tango and would probably put all these events onto 1 calendar, where I would have to filter out the tango-related stuff. And I would probably need access to all the agendas to correct errors or help them out with tricky issues like ‘how do I make a recurring event’.

SCENARIO 2: Because I wanted the option to only show tango events for Brussels or Antwerp, I though of several regional Google Calendars. I would then still have to figure out a way to merge all events into 1 calendar. But why manage 10 calendars when maybe one single one could do the job?

SCENARIO 3:
Let’s say I create one big Milonga.be calendar, where would I put it? Make or buy? ‘Make’ means hosting the calendar myself with a tool like PHPiCalendar, ‘buy’ means hosting it elsewhere (Google Calendar would be the preferred solution, since it’s free and hosted by, well, Google). Google manages the user accounts/passwords for me and already has syndication tools, so that’s what I chose for.

One big calendar where every organiser gets an editor account:

Embedding the full calendar into the milonga.be site is easy, since Google has <IFRAME>-based syndication tools built-in. But let’s make it a bit more difficult: filter out the Brussels events, or only the salons (the more upscale/expensive events).

I found a Wordpress plugin for iCal feeds: iCal events. It parses the .ICS feed into an XML format, and allows you to print out a list of events (no calendar visualisation). I hacked it a bit to display monthly events better and to allow filtering and now it can take the Google feed, do a search on all events that contain ‘SALON:’ and show only those. But it still shows recurring events as ‘Every Wednesday until June 2007′ instead of expanding that to ‘Wednesday April 25′, ‘Wednesday May 2nd’ …

So I installed PHPiCalendar and found out it can use Google Calendar feeds quite easily. It has the text-based event-list (’printer -friendly’) format as well as the calendar format, and it expands the recurring events. I can also use it to make customized <IFRAME>-based – or maybe even Javascript-based – syndication tools. So I’ll be diving into that PHP code.

Next step Google Maps!

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• Thursday March 29
  Bal: Opening Night @ Concert Noble
  
• Friday March 30
  Workshop: 19h – Giros y Boleos (with Sandy)
  Bal: Exhibition Night 1 @ Albert Hall
  
• Saturday March 31
  Workshop: 13h – Canyengue (with Vanessa)
  15h – Tango Vals (with Eva)
  17h – Milonga (with Eva)
  Bal: Exhibition Night 2 @ Albert Hall
• Sunday May 1
  Workshop: 13h – Tango Salon (with Eva)
  17h – Ganchos (with Sarah)
  Bal: Surprise and impro @ Vaudeville
  
• Monday May 2
  Bal: Closing Night @ Bains::Connective
  

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!

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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.

Tangotation

picture by Nadasdy

Tangotation is an effort to standardize simple tango notation. It concentrates on the feet of both dancers. Let’s show an example:
Inverted base step (8 count)

 LEAD  FOLLOW
1  MRB  WLF
2  MLS  WRS
   -MRC
3  MLF  WLB
4  MRF  WRB
       -WLBX
6  MLF  WRB
7  MRS  WLS
8  MRC  WRC 

Every step is described as a sequence of at least 3 letters: WLF is ‘woman (follower) – left (foot) – forward’, MRS is ‘man (leader) – right (foot) – sideways’.
In WLBX, the extra X stands for ‘Cross’/'Cruzada’ (foot crossed in front of the other).
The leading ‘-’ means that the step should be taken immediately after the previous one, not on a beat of its own. To sum it up:

syntax: ([-'])[MW][LR][FBSCP]([X8G...])

• WHO: [M/W] – Man/Woman (or for the politically correct: Marca/counterpart)
• WHAT: [L/R] – Left/Right foot
• WHERE: [F/B/S/C/P] – Front, Back, Side, Close, change weight
• WHEN: [-/'] ; every step is on the next beat unless “-”: link to previous step, “‘”: link to next step
• HOW: [X/8/G]: Cross (Cruzada), 8 (ocho), G (gancho)

(from Tangotation)

Each letter has one unambiguous meaning, the full Tangotation alphabet is here.

I’ve even made a print-out form to allow easy notation:

(as a JPG, as a PDF)

This is just a first draft, so all input is appreciated!

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<iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=esp68ffgd043pov5j6ev9su7nk%40group.calendar.google.com&height=614" style=" border-width:0 " width="640" frameborder="0" height="614"></iframe>

The data is also available as an XML feed (a variant of Atom, actually) but not in a very useful way. The data inside the feed (the item blocks) does not contain essential fields like start time and event location in separate fields. They are included in the HTML-formatted summary and content fields, so you would have to parse those to extract those details.

John Udell has published a script that fills in where and when tags in an Atom field (based on the http://schemas.google.com/g/2005 namespace), but Google does apparently not use those for publishing their XML feeds. Weird …

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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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Since it was my first tango holiday abroad, I did learn quite a lot:

• I’m not nearly as good in milonga (the simple style you dance in the often crowded tango salons) as I want to be. Being able to do two ganchos one after the other with a nifty little adorno in between is nice, but I enjoyed the simple milonga lessons the most (variations on the paso basico, …)
• As corny as “Holistic Holiday dedicated to Argentine Tango, Friendship and the Joy of Living” (cf tango-argentino.org) may sound, that was exactly was it was. The Italian food and drink, the hot water swimming pool, the sun, the foot massages, and that combined with tango dancing. Really a great way to spend a holiday.
• There’s more music you can tango on than the traditional Buenos Aires Gardel and Piazzolla tunes: I of course knew The Gotan Project, but apparently I should also check out Bajo Fondo Tango Club and Carlos Libedinsky (via tangonoticias.com). You can also dance to more western music like Grace Jones, Sting and Van Morrison (as can be found on Neotango.com)
• Experienced tango dancers sure know their tango music: song titles, orchestra styles, voices of singers. The knowledge I gather while creating the Tango Musica podcast will come in handy.
• Life ain’t fair. Men’s tango shoes can have heels up to 35mm (1.38″). Girls can go up to 80mm (3.14″). Raise that chin!
• The prejudices about Italians are largely based on the truth. As a man, I of course have no experience with the Italian macho seduction skills, but both men and women seem to have a natural tendency towards careless arrogance.
  

  As far as geography goes, you can never know too much about Italy. If you meet an Italian in Japan and ask where he’s from, he won’t say he’s from Italy. Instead he’ll name some obscure Italian city, assuming you know the ins and outs of his country.
  (from americangirlsareeasy.com)

Technorati: tango

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Pure text does not work for me, although TangoHK does a pretty good job of that. Tango video excerpts are rare on the net, and even those are not always clear. A guy in black pants dancing with a girl with a wide black skirt against a dark background… I always thought it should be possible to draw the steps in a clear way. Preferably a moving image (Flash/PowerPoint?) but already well drawn 2-D directions would do.

El Portal del Tango is one of the first sites that has these kind of drawings for tango steps. Here they are: simple salida (exit), forward ocho (eight), retroceso (regression), cadencia (cadence).

It does remind one of Twister, doesn’t it?

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In a previous life I probably have had some hispanic influences, for I am a total sucker for all things spanish. My guess would be: a passionate love affair with a Buenos Aires femme fatale, let’s call her Elena, who happens to be involved with, say, Angelo, the local maffia godfather. When the latter finds out about our liaison (a kiss, a glance, a restaurant bill?) , he consequently makes me swim with concrete boots, and thus returns my pasión-drenched soul to the reincarnation tredmill with a longing for someone to susurra palabras dulces en mi oído. (The femme fatale in question would resemble Mia Maestro in Tango, no me dejes nunca.)

Another girl with a definite positive influence on men’s heart rates (well, mine, for one) is Paz Vega. I did a test in Salamanca: if she were to play in a really bad movie, would I still enjoy it? The answer is yes – no surprise there. The movie was “Di que Si” (I won’t even bother linking to it), and it was really horrendous. Not all spanish directors are Almodovars, Amenábars or Medems, it would seem. But the flick had Paz dashing around in a tiny white tank top (a ‘marcelleke’ as they say in Belgium), so I didn’t care. I also bought El otro lado de la cama on DVD, featuring Paz Vega; and “Lujo Iberico”, a CD by Mala Rodriguez, that contains “Yo marco el minuto“, from the movie “Lucia y el sexo” with … you guessed it! Like Penelope Cruz, she has now crossed the Atlantic and is soon appearing in “Spanglish“, together with Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni.

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1. RF back
2. LF pass RF & to side (long step)
3. RF pass LF & fwd, O/P
4. LF fwd
5. RF close to LF
6. LF fwd
7. RF pass LF & to side, with pivot to left on LF
8. LF close to RF

So I started looking for some video fragments. Because it is expensive to provide movies on-line, the obvious place was to look on sites that sell tango videos. Tango-Argentino.info has some clips from their instruction DVDs, from the basic step to the Giro derecha con sacadas.
I also found some footage at 2leftfeet.com, but they must represent another religion within tango, because I don’t recognize even the base step.

And to get a feel of what might be possible after enough practice: clips from The Tango Lesson (1997).

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