Recital Photography

Photographing a dance recital offers a great opportunity to enhance your photographic skills. With the right camera settings, you’ll be well-prepared. Here’s a quick guide:

-EXPOSURE MODE - Set your exposure mode to Shutter Preferred Mode ("S" on most cameras). Then, set your shutter speed so that it's between about 1/80th of a second (for Sara's first recital) to about 1/200th of a second, (for things like Hip Hop, Tap, Ballet, etc.)

FLASH SETTING—Choose the setting on your camera that turns off the flash. Why???? Using a flash during a dance recital is a really, really dangerous thing to do. Especially in a darkened theater, having a flash go off in your eyes is a great way to temporarily blind a little (or big) dancer, causing them to not be able to see the lip of the stage they are performing on.

ISO SENSITIVITY SETTING—Look in your camera's manual and find the setting called "ISO." ISO is simply the setting that controls how sensitive the camera's optical sensor is to light. For most cameras, you will want to set the ISO to "AUTO."

-AUTO-FOCUS MODE - Try setting your camera to AF-S autofocus Single) mode. Most digital cameras support at least three different focus modes. AF-or autofocus single mod establishes your focus the moment you press the shutter release button halfway down and keeps that focus no matter what happens (unless you release the button and press it anew). This has several advantages for dance photography. First, YOU control the focus point. For example, if your dancer is the third from the right in a long line of dancers, you place him in the camera's focus point, depress the shutter button halfway (focusing on your dancer,) then while keeping the button half depressed, you can recompose the picture to include the remaining dancers. You will wind up with a wide shot of all the students in your child's class but with your particular dancer most clearly in focus, no matter what other factors are in play.

IMAGE QUALITY SETTING—This setting will usually default to "JPG Normal." This is the best place to start. You may come across recommendations that say you should only shoot in "Camera RAW" mode for absolutely the best quality, and though that is indeed true, don't bother until you've advanced past the beginner stage.

Why? JPG files are smaller and, in their native format, can be used directly for anything, including printing, use on your website, sharing by email or social media. RAW files are much larger and must be converted to JPG or other media-friendly format.

COLOR TEMPERATURE - Especially if you use JPG as your quality setting, you'll need to pay attention to your camera's color temperature setting. While this setting often defaults to "AUTO," you may find your results to be less than satisfactory. If traditional stage lighting is being used, switching this setting to "Tungsten" should help. If only overhead fluorescent lights are being used, the "Fluorescent" setting is the way to go. Unfortunately, in some instances you will find lighting includes LED instruments in the mix. The problem with many LED instruments is that color is 100% saturated all the time, which raises havoc with most digital sensors. In that case, shooting with the color temperature set to "AUTO" may be your best hope.