How many smiles are in a child on a given day? A week? A year? Certainly there is some number that would be a good guess, and that number would be different for every dancer. At DancEd, we are fortunate to be in the business of CREATING SMILES, and we take a lot of pride in making and capturing those awesome moments.
In any given year we shoot thousands & thousands of photos of the incredible DancEd Dancers. You see less than 1% of these pictures because it has never been practical for us to upload and share them all. That means that over the years there have literally been tens of thousands of special moments and beautiful DancEd smiles that have been lost to time, never to be enjoyed by the people who would treasure them the most. If a tree falls in the forrest and no one gets to see the pictures someone took of that tree, what does it matter??? (there’s a good analogy in there somewhere, I’m sure you get the point…) This has been our frustration for many years, and it has only gotten worse over time. Our DancEd MOMENTS have gotten bigger and our ability to CAPTURE them has gotten better. We have invested in the equipment and learned how to use it (more or less), we have the proximity and the beautiful subject matter to show off our dancers as the rock stars that they are. And that is exactly what we are going to do.
Beginning with the 2017 recital weekend, we are making available ALL of our recital photos on our new DancEd Photo Page through the DancEd website. ALL pictures have been sorted by RECITAL SHOW & NUMBER, and appear grouped by class. This includes the shots we took during BOTH dress rehearsal and the actual recital shows. It is a long time coming for us, because nothing has been more frustrating over the years to see great pictures of your children while knowing that mom will never see them because we simply can’t share them all. Now we can, and we will.
In the coming days/weeks we will add photos to the page that we have used over the course of the 2016-17 school year. If you saw a photo in a DancEd video on a poster at the studio, or displayed on facebook, we will try to make it available on the photo page. Once added, photos will always remain up for a few weeks to give parents & loved ones a chance to see them and download them if they wish. Once posted, ALL photos will be downloadable in their original, hi-res state so you can print them, edit them, blow them up to poster size, whatever you want. In looking over the recital images, all of them are around 8-12 MB so they are very large and high quality files. No, we are not messing around when it comes to showing off great DancEd Dancer Moments!!!!!!!
If you are anxious to see the recital album (there are about 130 of them, roughly one for every recital number and one for each of the two story ballets), you can click here: DancEd 2017 Recital Weekend Photo Page, or simply click on the red PHOTOS tab in the upper right of the DancEd website at www.danced.com. If you would like to read a bit more, please check out below for some facts & details about this cool new opportunity.
FUN FACTS, (not so) IMPORTANT INFORMATION, & DISCLAIMERS
- As much as we want to share your children back with you in the form of these special moments, making this happen has been a significant amount of work. As such, photos are available to download for a nominal fee. We are not doing this to sell you anything, we simply want to have a way to show you everything that we see of your children when we come home from a DancEd event. The photo hosting site requires that the ability for users to be able to purchase physical items (like paper photos, canvases, posters, etc) be set up, but our intention is simply to give you a way to download & keep high quality copies of the images we capture. So you can order merchandise if you like (our markup is much less than a traditional photographer would ever charge), or you can download a hi-res JPG file & do what you want with it.
- If you have ever tried to get a picture of your dancer and found it to be difficult (do you have any idea how many cameras & lenses we went through before we had upgraded enough to be able to get these good pictures???), you know that it is difficult and there are a zillions of things that can prevent us from getting good shots. As such, sometimes there are less good pictures of a specific class and for that we are sorry. We want to capture every DancEd Dancer at their best but the margin of error is very small when we are talking about shooting during a 2-3 minute dance number.
- The DancEd camera tends to gravitate toward the smiley dancer. It just can’t help itself.
- We’ve been taking pictures of DancEd Dancers for 20+ years. Does anyone remember the 3×5’s that we glued onto posterboard to put up at the studio? And over all of that time, the process of SELECTING photos has been the same – Find the best picture or three of a class and share them. As of right now, the challenge is the EXACT OPPOSITE. We are sharing all of the worthwhile photos, and attempting to REMOVE those that should not be shared. Eyes shut, messed up lighting, out of focus, these are all reasons why we would not want to include a photo among the 1000’s that we are sharing from recital weekend. But when you are starting out with so many thousands of photos, it is hard to quickly find the one’s that are not up to par. And we can’t look at each photo in it’s actual size, or we wouldn’t be sharing anything with you until next winter. So if something slips in that is out of focus or just too blurry, we are sorry about that. We are however, erring on the side of leaving some images in even if they aren’t perfect. After all, the idea is to share these moments back with you. In case you are wondering, we probably removed around 1500-2000 photos from the one’s that we did share from recital weekend.
- To anyone who is disappointed they don’t find a good shot of their dancer(s), we apologize and will keep trying. Just tell them to smile big while they are dancing and hopefully we will find them next time!
- Enjoy going through the photos and feel free to download them if you would like. Either way, we are sure that looking at some of these great moments will reinforce the irrefutable fact that DancEd DANCERS ROCK!!! CHECK THEM OUT HERE!