Day 36: Garba Dance

2026-03-14

Limited permission was granted to use photos taken for these events on this site.

Hello!

I'm coming home with some great street photography. I'll publish those on this blog in the coming days, but I haven't edited them to get the look I want, so it might be a while. I intended to publish at least one image from my travels, but at the moment, my miserable sleep habits are holding me back.

I offered to take photos at my school's Indian folk celebration, and I collaborated with another student photographer for the event. Without either of us realizing it, she taught me a lot about event photography that day, because her style of photography exposed a few ideas and styles that I was neglecting.

At the time, taking photos was a solo activity. I was not interacting with the students. The most daring photos I took were of my mates goofing off and acting cheeky. Never anything personal of people I didn't know. I tried everything possible to be as little a disturbance to others as possible.

That limitation was made with good intentions: people are having fun, and the event is not your studio space, so don't act like you own the room. But there are two steps that I could have taken.

After looking at my coworker's submissions the day after, I noticed that she used flash a lot. In comparison, I didn't use flash at all; a burst of light is distracting. But she also pulled friend groups and participants aside to get a shot. When people are willing to get their photo, they expect the flash anyway. Which helped loads in that badly-lit room; you could see people's smiles, and the flash overpowered the weird, green-tinted lights! Incredible.

Either way, I've got a lot to learn. I'm not decided on whether I should be using a full flash (I think it's too powerful for most scenarios, and I'm still reading up on it), but I've since been more free with asking families and groups for their photo.

At least I made efforts to get creative for this Garba dance. Instead of using flash to light a scene, I worked with the light available to me. Remember the exposure triangle?

I changed the shutter speed, increasing the amount of time the camera sensor is open and exposed to light. Because people were dancing and moving around, this makes everything look blurry. But if I kept increasing the exposure time, that motion blur could start to look intentional.

Instead of the photo stating that people were dancing, a long shutter speed actually shows the movement of those people dancing and flowing. It gives the people a smooth and soft look, while the center table remains in focus. Appropriately, it's the center of attention for this dance.

Cheers,
David