6-26-09_RioSmith_Dance_WashingtonSquare_YiChunWu

6-26-09_RioSmith_Dance_WashingtonSquare_YiChunWu

I know I haven't posted for a while, but here are a photos and experiences from this summer:

This past summer was amazing, spent in New York City, I interned with Dnace Photographer: Lois Greenfield (http://www.LoisGreenfield.com) and helped out Matt Karas (http://www.MattKaras.com) with a few shoots. There were a bunch of us working in the studio throughout the summer, from Jack, to Aaron MeWa, Amy and Yi-Chun, and then the few other interns. I learned a whole lot from each of them this summer, and treasure the experience.

Not only was it amazing from the studio side of things, but also from it just being NYC. I think I fell in love with the city a bit over the summer. There are so many interesting people to meet and things to do with endless possibilities.

In any case I decided that I couldn't let all this dance and photography float by me without working on a few shoots around the city myself.

Yi-Chun and I decided to work on this series together, trading off assisting and photographing. I think we both learned a lot from a each other as well as from the experience itself.

In this shoot Rio Smith of Kazuko Hirabayashi Dance Theatre came out on the shoot with us which took place in and around Washington Square.

So here are a few photos from this shoot:

3-27_30-09_NYC interning at Lois Greenfield studios workshop

3-27_30-09_NYC interning at Lois Greenfield studios workshop

First of all NYC was awesome, I learned so much from Lois Greenfield, Aaron, Matthew Karas, Yi-Chun and Jack Deaso.

My plan is to go back and intern with them this summer for a few weeks to hopefully learn a whole lot more.

Anyhow the weekend mostly consisted of throwing fabric and blowing the fan to make the dancers hair and clothes make pleasing lines for the 7 photographers at the workshop to shoot. 7 out of the 8 models (4 each day) came from the Amy Marshall Dance company which can be seen here as photographed by Lois Greenfield: http://www.loisgreenfield.com/dance/2185/amy-marshall.html

One of the photographers at the workshop was David Cooper who lives in Vancouver and has some pretty awesome photography check it out at www.davidcooperphotography.com.

Also Saturday night most of us from the workshop went to see Elliot Feld's "Ballet Tech" at the Joyce Theatre, which I must say the dancers did an awesome job at. There were some really interesting concepts. The first piece where large industrial fans that blew around tons of ripped up pieces of paper around a huge netted area with a dancer inside. Another piece had the dancer lighting himself with 2 LED lights in both hands, he himself controlled all the shadows and highlights that were visible to the audience. And me having really been involved in figure drawing for the last few years, I absolutely loved it. And the last piece I just cracked up. Yi-Chun shot some photos of that last part here: http://picasaweb.google.com/wuyichun/Ballet_Tech#
And then after I got to meet Elliot Feld, which was really cool.

Also on my trip I just happened to be near a flea market in NYC right across from my hotel and ran into Mike Reffie who owned one of the original (18 or 19 I think he said) A-Team Vans which was used in at least several episodes. I was kind of in awe when he drove off in that van (see photo below.)

So here are a few photos right from my cell phone.