Mexican Dancers With Afro-Influence

[rpcrowe]

The Dia de los Muertos Celebration in Escondido, California, last night included this dance troupe from Vera Cruz, Mexico. The troupe is unusual among Mexican folk dancers in that it has a heavy Afro influence. The Afro-Mexican influence is apparent in the music, parts of the costumes and the dance steps.

The lighting was fairly challenging. I shot in manual at ISO 3200 using 1/60 second at f/2.8 (maximum aperture of the lens that I was using), and pumped in a bit of light using a Flashpoint/Godox TTL350S with a Joe Demb FlipIt diffuser. I had the flash head straight up and the Flip-It tilted about 45 degrees towards the dancers which will give fair to middling light outdoors with no ceiling off which to bounce.... I wanted to just use the flash as fill and keep most of the ambient light in the background.

In retrospect, I should have used at least ISO 6400 in order to get a shutter speed of at least 1/125 second. The 1/60 second, in most cases, was not fast enough to stop the dancers. Perhaps I would probably have been better off using my Sony A7iii which can easily handle higher ISO's and which has IBIS.







Ideally, I would have used a monopod and second shutter flash which would have given me streaks of the dancer's costumes. However in this case, my wife and I stopped for dinner before we attended the celebration and thus, arriving late, I was shooting behind about three rows of standing spectators with the camera stretched over my head viewing the shots with the tilt down LCD of the little A6400.

This shot was done without flash fill and contains excessive noise even though I used NIK Dfine noise reduction software...



This is a more traditional form of Mexican dance... Still at 1/60 second using f/2.8 but, using ISO 6400. I wanted to get movement i the girl's skirts...



Next, I will try the A7iii with a faster lens that has stabilization

[Manfred M]

Very nice shots taken under challenging conditions.

Those bright yellow costumes certainly help pull in the viewer's eyes, regardless of what is going on in the background. Noise is certainly not a significant issue when I look at these images, Dfine seems to have done a fine job. I suspect that these are probably stronger than had you used fill flash. I find that it is tricky to get just right at events and the images often have too much light drop off, making it too obvious that fill light was used.

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured with the camera settings you used, if your editing required only middle to light noise reduction then you made the right choice.