Jump!

Jump!

Watching the SF Taiko Dojo perform at the Cherry Blossom festival, I tried to capture the sheer, raw energy of their performance. This was one of the luckier shots from that session — the main composers airborne from a simultaneous drumbeating jump they were making, soon to come down with a heavy whack on their drum skins.

There are things I would have liked differently in this picture — it's a somewhat busy background, and I could have gotten better separation between dancers and backdrops; but it's not that bad. The things I want to show: the dancers, the drums and drumsticks, the energy and action of the performance all come through as cleanly and clearly as anything. For the amount of snapshotting — of taking, not making, a photograph that went into this, I am quite happy with the results. Convincing, illustrative, emotional. A fair shot.