As I sit here sipping a luke-warm cup of coffee waiting for the all of the images from the event to upload, I said to myself, “Self, you should post a blog entry about this event”.  Melissa and Mando, my friends from Shundo Dance Studio, invited me once again to come out to the latest of their “Gotta Dance” series titled “Superstars”.  The event was held on Sunday, October 23, 2011 at the Chamizal National Memorial Theatre, and featured a full spectrum of dance routines performed by professional and student dancers from Shundo.  The dances were set to music from six legendary performers over the last century; Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Abba, Gloria Estefan, and Michael Jackson.

The night’s take was approximately 1500 photos, all shot handheld without flash at ISO 3200 using a mix of lenses and Canon EOS series DSLRs, and I tried desperately to keep the shutter speed at around 1/160th to 1/200th of a second to try to freeze the action as much as possible.   I applied a liberal amount of noise reduction in post processing to reduce the grain produced at such high sensitivity, and while I am not a big fan of noise reduction in general, for these events it is almost a necessity, and provides the pleasing side effect of softening and smoothing skin in the harsh stage light.  Clearly, you get to be the judge on how the photos turned out.

The images will are available on both of my online photo services at Photoshelter (downloads only) and SmugMug (all purchase types).  If you are interested in purchasing prints, products, and/or downloads of the images (including the entire gallery of images), please visit the gallery on Smugmug.  This site allows me to offer a single flat rate price for visitors to purchase the entire gallery.  Unfortunately, Photoshelter does not have this feature, but has other features that I use so I decided to upload to both places.  The images are exactly the same quality and size on both sites.

You may also contact Melissa or Mando at Shundo Dance Studio for availability of a DVD containing all of the images.  The price is the same as a full gallery download; just be sure to give them your name and address so a DVD can be mailed to you.

NOTE:  This is the link to the gallery of images with purchase options.

Steve