Reading Response: Freeman Ch. 6

Two Senior Dancers preform the dress rehearsal of BalletMet Artistic Director Edwaard Liang’s “Für Alina” for the October 2021 Fall Show, “A Leap Forward,” hosted by IU’s Opera and Ballet theater department. Credit: Meredyth Jones.

This photo is one that I captured in the fall of my Junior year at the dress rehearsals for the fall ballet show in the Jacobs School of Music auditorium. I thought it was a good image to use in this reading response because it demonstrates the idea of process, which is the main point of Freeman’s Chapter 6 in “The Photographer’s Eye.” During this photoshoot, in which I used an image from for the Chapter 4 reading response as well, I learned more than I ever had before about my camera and how photography works. I had to attend both showings of the dress rehearsal in order to get pictures that I was actually proud of. I wanted contrast and wanted to capture the light on the dancers skin but I had to learn that I could not do this by slowing my shutter speed because then I would not be able to clearly capture the dancers in their poses while they were quickly moving. This photo shoot taught me a lot about the process that goes in behind a photo, I knew what I wanted to capture and how I wanted it framed but I realized how difficult it was to capture the exact moments that I wanted as my subjects were moving faster than any subject I had ever shot before. “The fleeting moment” is what I wanted to capture and is what we learn about in Chapter 6. This image is an example of one of the first times I was able to capture a fleeting moment and all of its beauty, just before these two dancers fell right into another pose.