Photographing Social Dancing in Sweden

Today I posted my first album with pictures from social dancing. This was just an experiment because I felt that my feet would not survive 4 hours on the dance floor, but I still couldn't miss my favorite band Blender, so I brought my camera instead.

Album on Facebook

Album on our website

The feedback was straight out positive and it is cool to go through the images and observe what the others around me are doing and how they are doing it. If you still don't like my photo page (as in: Click the "like" button), please do so!

Here some observations

1) Many of you wear ear protection.

2) I shot both the slow and the faster songs likewise, without thinking about it. Most of the pictures though are showing people dancing Fox, not Bugg. Is this the new trend, dancing Fox even to the faster songs? They say this is the case in the north of Sweden, but when I was there I couldn't spot any difference and many ladies there specifically wanted a Bugg for the faster songs. I prefer the Fox by far, though.

3) In most pictures, the partners are both about the same height. This almost never happens to me - most of the ladies I dance with are considerably shorter than myself - which has the advantage of being able to see the environment better.

4) Most people dancing the Fox do it forehead to forehead. For me this is more the exception although I have done it more frequently lately. I guess I'm just too tall for this to be comfortable in many cases. You not living in Sweden might wonder what we are doing up here, getting that close to complete strangers when it is 30 degrees outside, but I guess we just enjoy the proximity, especially when dancing to a slow ballad, because our winters are cold and dark. It is really a wonderful experience if you do it for several hours straight!

5) One of the biggest challenges of photographing social dancing is not the low light, but avoiding big plain naked underarms making up half of your picture.

6) Most people seem to appreciate when you take photos of them. Yes, there have been many other photographers around all the time and I also try to be caught on at least one or two shots when I spot them, but I was expecting a little more resistance or delete requests, but not at all!
7) Just the opposite is true: They try to pose and look into the camera which often spoils the picture, so you have to hide a bit to capture an authentic moment.

8) I have been at this place dozens of times before, danced with many of the ladies there and recognize most of the guys as well, but when I tried to tag the ones I know, I noticed that I was only friends with five (5) of them. Plus I know the first name of maybe 10 more, but that was it. All the others I have no clue who they are and of the 135 people who liked the album so far, I know only two, the rest of the names do not ring any bells.

9) Still, people seem to know me and even my name. This is probably a good sign, but as we say in Sweden: "Everybody knows the monkey, but the monkey does not know anybody". Some even contacted me at my personal profile and asked about the pictures before I had a chance to post them. They didn't know about my photo page, but they knew who I was and succeeded to look me up on Facebook.

10) All in all it seems to be a good idea to sometimes slow down, watch the others do their thing, learn and observe. On the other hand: Dancing for 4 hours flat is just so much fun it is hard to step back. :-)