Indepen-dance in the District

I figured it was time to post some photos from a shoot with Swedish house music DJ John Dahlback. This is now the third year in a row that I've found myself shooting photos of a DJ the Thursday before a July 4th weekend. I think this year was the best so far because of the range of images I was able to capture along the way.

We started our evening on the terrace where I was able to catch some amazing shots of the club and the lasers permeating the crowd of house heads below. I also captured some shots of my friends who were happy to give their best Zoolander face and pose for some provocative silhouette shots throughout the club. Having friends who are models is so rad!

So the part of the evening I enjoyed most was finding the ability to shoot some of these shots with such a low ISO setting. ISO settings for non-photo geeks measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. Higher ISO settings are generally used in darker situations to get faster shutter speeds (for example an indoor sports event when you want to freeze the action in lower light) - however the cost is noisier shots. You can see this in some of my previous photo galleries where either the lighting was poor or the DJ bounced all over the place and I needed to speed up my shutter to keep my subject from blurring across the shot.

By shooting with a higher sensitivity, my shots of John Dahlback came out much crisper than normal. This was specially satisfying knowing I can print these shots in a much larger format now because the grain was kept to a minimum. It also doesn't hurt that the lighting in the Ultra Bar DJ booth is brimming in blue illumination.

The following are a few more shots from the evening. The complete gallery can be seen right here on dougvansant.com. Enjoy...

Labels: Clubs, Dancing, DJs, Entertainment, House, Music, Nightlife, Photography

posted by DVS @ 11:49 AM