Recently, several times per week I’ve been spending an hour or two biking. Usually after supper, with Ingress as a motivator. My route home goes by a flamenco bar; and it’s absurdly easy to counteract the biking benefits with a couple of Guinesses while I watch the last set. And take pictures.
The Kino Café is, to be honest, kind of a dump, and I hope the dancers are pursuing this as a hobby not a profession; the way it works is, there’s no cover, but after each set the prettiest among them goes around with a little basket, which gets pretty full of folding money when the bar’s full, and doesn’t when it’s not.
I was there with my camera on a recent quiet night, and there were two dancers.
The in-focus one moved my heart most, with her face and her command of the stage.
This other woman, though, had a better dress and was easier to photograph.
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Also, she did a number with a swirly black shawl, and it was excellent.
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Between sets, I saw my waitress working out a routine with her; they shared smiles as they polished their wrist movements and I wanted to get out the camera but it was a private moment. Then the waitress leaped up on stage briefly too, and she didn’t have the dress but she had the moves.
I recommend, next time you’re house-hunting, finding a neighborhood with a flamenco bar in it.
Technical notes · These are all with the 35mm F1.4 on the X-T1, most at F/1.4 except for a couple where I accidentally pushed it up to F/2, forcing the camera up to ISO6400, which I find really hurts the color fidelity and blows out bright spots. Everything’s at 1/60sec, which you can do with flamenco because the dance is full of stops.
The light’s lousy and the room’s too red; I found that switching into Lightroom’s Fujifilm “Camera Pro Neg. Std” film rendition really took that red edge off, and then on a couple I backed off the saturation still further.
