these photos were taken a couple weeks ago now, at a weekly dance party that started back in 2020 called Days Like This. Friday night, 5-9:30, just impeccable vibes. really great fun. The first couple were from before, we went to Coach and had sushi before dancing.
despite the fact that the break dancing is the majority of the pictures here, it only really lasted a couple songs. We got to the party late, around 8ish, danced for a while, and then I took a bunch of pictures. I found myself screwing around with the focus modes, trying to find the right one. I think I landed on the 3d-tracking mode? Honestly modern AF is black magic to me, and I’m probably going to spend a little time learning it, because it’s a neat trick to have when the situation arises. 8 frames a second doesn’t hurt, either.
I am woefully behind on editing photos, I still haven’t gotten through the stuff from Driftwood and that was back in August. Had something of a block about it, unfortunately. The photo sets are large and mean a lot to me so I want to get them right (whatever that means) and so I want to do them when I have time to just sit with them but I never do; there’s no increment of time large enough to really digest that many photos into a coherent set.
I am making progress, though. I have a method I think of as the ‘bangers only’ method. When I’m doing my initial selects, I do a pass and bring anything that might work once I’ve punched it up a bit, and then I do a pass toning all of those (global exposure, white balance, etc) and then often this is where my process stalls. I’ll have 60 or 100 photos in a collection, from several days of work, and I’ll have to choose from those, and I just can’t say no to any of them.
That’s where the next step comes in; I have to say ‘yes’ to the picture to get it past this step. No ‘maybe’, no ‘if I squint’, just the ones that are definitely good by my judgement. That usually helps. I got this set down from 50 to 15 in like five minutes (it helped that there were a couple blurry sequences and obvious winners in there). Driftwood 2024, the edit went from 120 to 49 very quickly. I need to do this for the Retreat photos as well, and then hopefully I’ll have both of those posts out soonish. I’m also thinking about doing a book? Maybe? DW 2024 and Retreat 2025. Maybe.
