Aside from photography, one of my favorite things to do is ballroom dance. I first began dancing at the UBC Dance Club about 4 years ago when I first entered UBC, and since then I’ve more or less kept at it. In my last two years, I also had the amazing experience of being on the UBC Dance Club Executive where I acted as publicity representative as two years.
Now that I’ve graduated from UBC, my time as a Dance Club executive has come to an end. However, I will continue to be involved in ballroom dancing as long as my legs can move. Below is a picture of fellow dance club members dancing the Vogue, a Dance Club tradition where we perform a synchronized line-dance to the Madonna song “Vogue”.
Click on the image to view a larger version.
Speaking of ballroom dance, I will be competing in a competition this upcoming Saturday; so stay tuned to see an update regarding that and pictures of top level ballroom dancers!
If you want to improve as a photographer, one of the first steps of doing so is to take time to look at and become inspired by other people’s work. Recently I came across this photographer’s website and there was one image I was completely blown away by. It’s the 4th picture from the left in the “portrait” section. Later on I was told by a fellow photographer that the particular effect used on that photo is known as “dragan”, named after the photographer Andrzej Dragan In a nutshell, it’s a photographic technique usually for portraits that brings and accentuates all the details of an image. Now normally, depending on what you shoot, you would want to avoid emphasizing the wrinkles, folds, and spots on a person’s face, but when used correctly, it’s quite an amazing effect as these two photographers have proved.
So I thought I’d have some fun and try the technique out for myself, courtesy of a photoshop action known as “draganizer” I found online. The person in the picture below is none other than my dad. I’ve posted an unaltered pictured on the right for comparison.
Click on the photos to see the larger versions.
For this particular photo, the dragan effect doesn’t seem to work well. If I had made a simply change to the background instead and had a dark one instead, it would have been more appropriate. But then again, my dad probably wasn’t the best subject for this photo experiment either. Oh well, I’ll end up with something better next time.
