Beyond the obvious

To me the expressive moment is simply the moment captured through the lens by the photographer when there is a clear expression of mood, emotion and feeling. It is different to Henri Cartier Bresson's 'decisive moment' which revolves around a visual harmony and balance in the frame rather than being about emotion and expression. The ideal is to achieve both the perfect visual balance across the frame, the decisive moment, and capture the expressive moment. Of the two I would choose the expressive moment as the most important because the essence of photography is to communicate an idea or emotion to your audience. Of course the aesthetic elements of an image play a vital role, but they support the message rather than being the message - just as in architecture, form should follow function. This is the realm of photojournalism, editorial photography, advertising, street and fashion photography. Here we use the expressive moment to get the audience to: really see fee...

See and hear the Flamenco photo story action. And turn up the volume! In my previous post I described the photographic technique I used and how we came to shoot this story on a world famous Flamenco dance school . There was a lot of interest in the blog post so, using Magda's Indigo's behind the scenes video footage I made this short film (3.45minutes). You'll get a much better understanding of the lighting conditions and circumstances we were working in, and we have have included some of the still images from the story so you can see how I interpreted the scene and the results. In all the whole shoot lasted about 60 minutes. We used minimal equipment (see previous blog post ). Hope you enjoy our film. Please let me know what you think of the images too. If you'd like to see the higher resolution versions you can view them on my portfolio of  Flamenco photographs . Till soon, Paul www.indigo2photography.co.uk

Flamenco is full of passion and fire. When these dancers tap out there vibrant rhythms the floor shakes. As you watch your heart beats faster, your temperature rises and energy courses through your veins. The dancers work incredibly hard. You'll see that in the images. We were fortunate enough to photograph an advanced dance class at one of the world's best Flamenco schools. Please take a moment to view the selected images from my photo-story . When the image opens you can click the i to see the accompanying text. Here are most of the same images on Flickr too. For those interested in the technical side, I used one flash, bounced on the white walls and 'dragged' the shutter to achieve a balance with the ambient light (which was mainly terrible overhead florescent). It was a real challenge. For the most part I used a 50mm lens. The wider shots were done with the 17-40mm on my Canon 5D. I did not use burst mode. It's too random and you miss vital moments - far...