Photographing tango dancers: emotion, gesture, and light struggles

I recently started photographing dancers here in Armenia. Something I never thought I'd be doing. It's a huge surprise to me, but insanely fun given it contains everything about filmmaking and photography that I love, and most of the work is being done for me. What I mean by this is that all I really have to think about is adapting to composition and light to get a decent image, those in front of the lens just perform as they usually do and provide me with the opportunity to capture them. Though the light side of things has been a bit of a struggle for a few reasons: dancing requires the use of a higher shutter speed in order to capture sharpness in what can be very fast movements. To get a good, sharp image, you'll have to use a continuous shutter and a high shutter speed. For depth-of-field, you'll want to use higher focal lengths or get really close to the performers to get that background separation. It sounds easy, the basics of photography after all; up until you attend the event and come to the realisation that dancers love to dance in moody, dark lighting. So throw that high shutter speed out of the window, because you're either going to have to increase the ISO and accept a noisy image to accept in more light, or lower that shutter speed and aperture to bring in as much light as possible without ruining the image with noise.

This is what has been the case the last few times. Using a 35mm F1.8 lens, it's wide enough to capture beautiful portraits and landscapes, but that focal length as mentioned requires getting a bit closer to the performers in order to frame the image nicely. I don't mind doing this, and these performers don't mind it either. They are incredible to watch, their gestures, gentle movements, emotion visible in their faces even without much expression. Eyes closed, hands gently holding another. The move with sudden twists and turns, back to a slowness that allows for quick shots that really capture these special moments. I weave around the room between them, trying to not get too in the middle of the dancing and close enough to capture them. I long for my 85mm F1.8 lens for a closer glimpse at these moments, to get a tighter but more emotional and up-close image on certain features in their dancing. I talk to them after the events and we discuss the photography, the dancing and the visible emotion in it. I know I can obtain better images. I know with each event I attend I just want to capture more, but gear is a bit of a limitation at the moment.

I have to find this mixture between a noisy image, and capturing the gesture. I'll come home with a few hundred images taken and find maybe twenty that I feel I just about like. Finding a lot of strengths that I wanted to capture, moments that feel magical almost, but just not entirely portrayed the way I wish they were. A lot of this really is just down to lighting situations. The struggle to capturing a fast-moving space with little light is continuous, I long for a shoot in a daylight space. Don't get me wrong, the places I visit are beautiful, such odd spaces I don't think I'd ever discover on my own. Dark, old Soviet homes tucked away in random spaces in Yerevan. Or more modern bars that have aspiring writers sitting at them, caught in the middle of a sudden tango group dancing away deep into the night. Different people to meet and talk to, things to capture. Life to witness unfold. The potential to film it all. The need to film it all.

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