The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Maia
Welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers podcast. This is your host, Maia. I am so excited for a Casual Dance Teachers podcast first today.

We have our first returning guest, Ian Howe. If you've been listening to the podcast and caught Ian's first episode, which was all about diversifying and setting yourself up to really enjoy and be enthusiastic about your career as a dance educator, you will know that that is actually not the topic that I had initially asked Ian to talk about for the show. Today's episode will be the topic that I had initially booked Ian to talk about, which is dance photography.

Totally new topic and lots and lots of insights here for how you as a dance teacher can set up great poses for your dancers, for their recital photos or general dance photography, or even get involved in being a dance photographer yourself. Before we begin today's episode, I will go ahead and reintroduce Ian because he just has such an impressive resume, and I think it's important to know the many different facets of his career that have contributed to his eye as a dance photographer. Ian is the owner and artistic director of Pacific West Performing Arts and teaches at various studios around the Seattle, Washington area.

He also travels and sets competitive choreography and runs intensives around the country and around the world. Ian created Influx Dance with Anika Parr, a new company that focuses on choreography and style. He's performed regularly with Third Shift Dance and was also the associate director for Third Shift Dance Youth Ensemble.

He worked with Platinum National Dance Competition as director, judge, emcee, and teacher, and has choreographed numerous musicals. He started the dance company Apropos Modus in 2021 with Karen Tobin, and in 2022, Ian started his own dance photography business, Dance Meets the Eye. Without further ado, let's hear more from Ian.

Welcome, Ian. Thank you so much for being here.

Ian
Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Maia
Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you, and we're taking an interesting angle with this. We're going to be talking about your dance photography, but the first thing that I want to lead with is how you started getting into this as a business, because you are already doing so much.

Like, you're in Australia right now. We had to schedule around a crazy time difference. You're doing choreography and masterclasses and this and that.

I'm like, why? What even led you to go into dance photography as like a little extra business?

Ian
You know, honestly, in my new part of it, it was because of COVID, because everything was obviously shut down so we couldn't do things normally, and my photographer and videographer that I used at that time had moved back to California to be with family, so I was kind of left without anybody and anything. So ironically, our venue had just gotten canceled, so I needed to figure out how to work that. It was just a whole mess.

We were like, all right, we're just going to do it inside. So I bought two cameras. I bought like two very nice professional video cameras and then a photography camera, got lighting, set up my cameras, and then we had a hundred and, gosh, I think it was a hundred and ten numbers, a hundred numbers, something like that, that we're supposed to do our recitals.

We have a bigger studio. So I just figured out how to videotape them from different angles and take pictures at the same time. And that's what we did for a solid week, was just have each group come in, masked up.

They would do their dance two or three times. I would videotape. So I was taking six videos per dance.

Maia
Whoa.

Ian
Yeah, six videos per dance. And then, you know, after we got through all, how many of our numbers, learned how to video edit and do photography editing too.

Maia
Oh my gosh.

Ian
That's the smaller version of it. Bigger version is just diversifying myself.

That's why I do so many things. Teach choreograph, direct and judge for competitions, travel to Australia to go teach, why not? Own studios, dance companies. Just trying to, as my body decides it doesn't want to do things, trying to stay relevant and useful in this industry.

Maia
Amazing. That's like such a good nugget right there in itself. Just being able to diversify and know when to pick up something else and drop something that's no longer working for you. Like that's amazing. One question that this brings up for me is when you are modeling or do you model, I guess, the poses that you want the dancers to take when you're taking photographs? Because that's another thing where if physically you have certain limitations, how do you get the dancers to portray your vision as a photographer without necessarily having to be super active back and forth, showing them jumping and all that sort of thing?

Ian
Right now, a lot of my photography is just for studios, for the recital and that type of deal. So, you know, there's the basic poses that you get and everything.

But I try to tell dancers, okay, so the younger ones, obviously, stand there, feet in first, hands on your hips, big old smile. If you can get that in 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, you're great, golden, let's move on. But with the older kids, I try to give them a little more freedom.

And I try to tell them like, hey, go spend five minutes on your phone, not looking at TikToks and go find dance poses or go find TikToks that have dance poses on them. You know, they might only get one or two images, but I try to give them the freedom to try to experiment with stuff. So I think the advantage being a dancer, and that was the thing that I loved with my previous photographers that I used, they were also dancers, is that we just kind of have that eye and we kind of have that knowledge of knowing like, okay, you're trying to do a leap.

You get two tries to do it this way. If it's not working, then we're going to try something that's a little bit different just because you kind of know like what they're going to be able to do. So I think that that makes it a lot easier to just kind of play around with things because myself being a dancer, I can be like, okay, try this, do this.

You're not as flexible that way. So we're going to have to try it this way. And then just, you know, once you get that vibe, and once you kind of get the basic idea of what you want, then that's when you can play with lighting and everything else. But I don't usually come in with a specific idea.

Maia
Yeah, no, that answers actually a lot of the questions that were kind of going through my head when we first started. And the thing that I always come back to is efficiency.

How do you keep it creative, make sure you're not like throwing everyone into a box of looking very similar or getting stagnant because once you get beyond the little ones, they don't want to just stand in first position and smile, but still not take forever of sure that would be ideal. Oh, you know, we have unlimited time to get all the great pictures. But in that studio setting, you got to kind of churn them out.
So do you have any tips for keeping it super efficient and focused and moving through that process quickly?

Ian
If you don't have the time built in like I have, so for my studio, for my studios, rather, we have probably like 100 classes that we have to go through in a week. And then those classes can be anywhere from four to five kids up to, you know, the little ones 16 or 18. So the biggest thing that I had to figure out was like, you can't get stuck on trying to make it look artistic necessarily.

It's recital photos like, you know, again, with the older ones, usually they have an idea. Usually you're able to just verbally say something to them so that they're a little easier to direct. But like, you know, with the little ones, here's your three poses.

Which one do you like the best? Which one are you going to stand still for the longest? You know, and those parents, too, they're just happy to see their little ones in the all the sparkles with the smile, hopefully. So that was the biggest thing is just realizing that you just have to go through like for each pose, I'll snap between three to five photos like in succession and then just hope and pray to the dance gods that one of those they're square and smiling and there's nothing weird. A lot of the efficiency is just getting over our artistic hang ups of what we want it to look like and realizing that it's not a modeling session where you have an hour or two with like one or two dancers and you can kind of just play around.

This last May when I was taking photos for my studio, I took over 7000 photos in from Monday to Monday to Sunday because we had to extend things a little bit. But I mean, I took over 7000 photos and out of those 7000 photos, I think maybe after I picked everything out, it was under 1000 photos that I actually edited, had up on the website for people to buy.

Maia
Now you do - I was mentioning this to you before the interview that I noticed that you do some really interesting things with lighting, because a lot of times when I see studio photos, it is just, you know, everything's bright, bright, bright in that pose with the smiles and all that. But I did notice that some of your photos seem to incorporate shadows in a really interesting way. And I'm just curious what your process was like when you were learning that and how much maybe being a choreographer and working with lighting technicians for this stage may be influenced your view of lighting for photography.

Ian
So a lot of the things that I experiment with is literally just me going like, all right, well, let's turn off this light and see what it produces or let's go to this setting or whatever. So genuinely, a lot of the stuff that I've put out there that I'm happy with was the little happy accidents of just trying something and being like, OK, well, in theory, this should work this way. Let's see what happens.

Some of the best photos that I love to doing, I literally just turned off the lights, turned on one in the background. I was like, OK, move around. Let's see what happens.

You know, and it produced some of the best results. I think having working with lighting designers kind of helped. But again, I think it just comes back to that creative artistic side being like, well, I don't like this.

How can we make this work in X, Y, Z? And then just trying 36 different ways and seeing which one one is the easiest, but to the produces what you want. Yeah. And then from there, it's just building on it.

You know, you get a basic idea and then you're like, oh, OK, well, if I have a light coming from back here, it's obviously going to put you in a silhouette, depending on which way you do this. But then what happens if I change the color over here or, you know, settings on your camera or different? Yeah. Just so many different things.

So it's just building on top of each other until you get the result that you like or result you didn't know that was going to happen.

Maia
Are you like that as a choreographer, too?

Ian
Lots of experimenting. A hundred and ten percent. I'm one of those choreographers that like I have teachers and I have students that I've taught that they you know, they have their little choreography notebook, they write down, you know, all the things and they have all this. I might come in with like a short phrase, but usually I'm changing the song like 20 minutes up until whatever I'm supposed to be doing, unless it's one that I've really locked into. But yeah, my brain does not work in the capacity of like writing things down and adapting it.

I have to be physically in the space with the kids, with the dancers, whoever it is, and just kind of be like, all right, learn this. And then we're going to play around with it.

Maia
You're the choreographer that I hate because I'm the most structured person in the world. So when a choreographer is like changing stuff on me, I'm like, oh, I already learned it this way.

Ian
No, and I mean, and that's the thing is that, like, I mean, I have such an appreciation for people who do have that organization. There's a part of me that wishes I had that.

But for me, it stresses me out more to try to come in with a vision. And I think this is where it also ties into photography. Like it stresses me out more to come in with like a specific vision and then not, and it's no fault of the dancer, but, you know, to come in with a vision and then try to get it to work and the dancers don't fit into that vision or it's not working out the way exactly I had it in my head.

So I would rather have the expectation of coming in, working with people, again, photography, choreography, it all kind of intersects. Just see what it can be produced unless there's like a specific vision or I'm being asked to do something specifically. But just to come in with the open vibe of like, OK, we're going to try X, Y and Z. None of these may work.

They all might work, but let's see what we can produce. Let's see what we can create. For me, I've just had a better, mentally I have a better experience with that.

But yeah, so I get like I appreciate both sides of it. Again, there are times that I wish I could come in and just be like, yep, I've got deep, deep, deep, let's go. But nine times out of ten, like I was choreographing right before I came to Australia and I was supposed to create three dances in a day.

I had picked out all these songs and then literally 20 minutes before the kids came in, I was like, no, don't like these songs. So we're just going to change them. And it was a complete vibe change, complete just like, I don't know what we're doing.

We're just going to play. Here's the song. So, yeah.

Maia
Yeah, no, I have such admiration. I was definitely joking about hating, although, like I said, I like to have structure. It's not my style. But obviously, once you've been a dance teacher for even like a second, you realize you have to be adaptable. And with photography, I can only imagine. I mean, our studio does do photography for our recital. So I have some experience with that, but not on the scale that you're working with all different groups and back to back and hundreds of different students. So I love the adaptability.

Ian
Yes. No. And I mean, and again, it's still I mean, I've been doing it for the past few years now, but it's still like I'm still learning. I'm still figuring out how to make things a little more efficient or how to work with certain people. Some days it's great and it just goes. Other days it is an absolute slog. So it is - Yeah, it's a learning experience.

Maia
I did want to ask you, I know not all studios will have access to a dance photographer. So do you have any tips if someone's trying to vet photographers and they don't have a portfolio of dance shots or they don't have experience working with dancers specifically? Are there still certain questions to ask that might help you choose someone that can get dance shots appropriately for recital photography without having that experience?

Ian
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely I think if you're stepping back and looking at it and there might be other people who listen to this and are yelling at me and being like, no, it's not believable or whatever. But I would say that, like, you know, again, being a dancer, it offers an advantage just because we already have that eye. We already have that. I say sensibility. It's not sensibility, but like we already have that vibe with we just know like we can look at something like Attitude, Arabesque, whatever. But I would say stepping back like it's no different in the sense of that it's movement, it's odd shapes that you're dealing with would be like sports photography or even portrait photography. So I would say look at the people's portfolio regardless if they have dance experience or not, because you're going to see that more established photographers have a style.

They have a style. They have a way that they like to shoot. You know, they have a specific type of editing.

So looking at that and being able to kind of vet that first, does that fit with the vibe? Does that fit with the branding? Does that fit with what you want parents to buy? And then, you know, if that fits first and just start asking them questions, be like, hey, we're going to have some subjects that are doing this. We're going to have some people doing this. Do you feel comfy getting that? Do you have something that we could see that might be related to that? You know, because there are going to be some photographers that just aren't comfy with that.

They prefer, you know, more still subjects or more specific type of things. So that's where I would start at least. And then obviously, like word of mouth, that's another thing.

Like I had no trouble reaching out to other studios and being like the photographer that I'm using or that if whatever, don't like this, don't like that. Do you have somebody that you use or do you have somebody that you recommend? So that's also worked for me in the past.

Maia
I know some of our listeners also are at the types of programs that wouldn't necessarily have formal recital pictures, don't necessarily have the budget to hire a photographer. So do you have any DIY tips like editing software equipment that someone that's trying to get some pictures, you know, to serve their students or maybe use on social media to promote their program or whatever the case may be to do it themselves?

Ian
OK, there are different budgets, obviously, for right now. You can go on eBay and honestly get like one of the newer smartphones like a Samsung phone or an iPhone. They take amazing photos like you can genuinely do probably a solid eighty five, ninety percent of whatever advertising photos and even probably some staged photos, that type of deal, even videos.

And that's going to cost you a couple hundred bucks maybe at the most to get one of those. There's free editing software out there. There's free video editing software out there.

I personally pay for and use Lightroom, which is an Adobe product. It's not cheap, but it's worth the money. And then for video editing, there's DaVinci Resolve, which is free.

It is a full editing software suite for video. Go check it out. It's really, really good software.

I've used it for years. But yeah, I mean, you can start with just literally a smartphone. Do that.

It's really easy as you work your way up. It just depends on what you want to do. Like I said, I bought professional grade video cameras, professional grade photography cameras.

So I would say it's like looking at your budget and then looking at what you want to do and then decide, like, is it worth the money to invest and will you pay yourself back? That's the thing, is that like some of the photographers I used, I didn't get paid. Like it didn't pay back to the studio. I was just like, I don't want to deal with that end of it.

You're going to do all the editing. You're going to do all this. You take all the money.

Just come take the photos. Let me use them for free. So that was that payment.

But then, you know, when COVID hit again and everything shut down, I was like, oh, that's easily thousands and thousands of dollars. They can come back into the studio. So within, I think, a year and a half, I bought all that equipment.

I had repaid all of that. And now all of it goes back into the studio. And I'm cheap when it comes to my pricing compared to more professional, which they're worth it.

I'm just like, I don't, I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it just to keep it in house. Oh, you would ask me another aspect. Oh, lighting. Yep. That's a thing, too.

You can do something as simple as just those little cheap LED lights, not the lighting ones that go around, but just like little LED boxes. Super simple, super easy to set up, not expensive. Again, if you're going to try to go up in quality, I have six box lights now that are all varying sizes, varying intensities.

I have LED panels that are actually like things like 64 by 64 lights that are squares, can change the color, change the intensity, all of that. I have a professional flash system that connects to my camera. And it just depends on how involved you want to get.

But places like B&H Photography, I think it's called Adorama Photography, too. It's all online. They have different packages.

I literally started with just like a three light package that had the attached flash. It was like three, four hundred bucks. And then I just upgraded from there as I needed to.

Maia
So I am coming at this completely ignorant of like anything to do with photography, technology, anything like that. But I can see the value for a lot of people. Like I was even thinking not just for teachers, but thinking back to when I had to audition and like send in photos and videos and all of that.

And I don't even want to tell you like how terrible the things that I sent in were and not professional at all. But it's so helpful for so many things.

I have a two part question for you. Part one being anything else you want to add as far as the photography side of things goes. Part two being can you also add and maybe we need like a whole nother hour for this because you have a bazillion things that you're up to. But can you add some of the different resources and ways that people can follow what you're doing?

Ian
OK, it's a lot.

Maia
I have been down the rabbit hole. I was like, hello. Like, is there anything you don't do?

Ian
Well, first question, I genuinely think that it just helps expand your knowledge and helps the kids expand their knowledge, taking the time to give them not just the education of how to kickball change or how to smile on stage, especially if they want to be a professional dancer, you know, getting them to understand, like even if it's really just on your phone, like, you know, videotaping them and moving around, getting them to understand, like, OK, you know, when should I be looking at the camera directly? When should I be focused forward dancing, getting them to understand the different angles of photography and how, I mean, as dumb as it sounds like, you know, the old saying of like, you know, TV adds 10 pounds or like different angles add whatever.

It's true. Like depending on what angle you're at and where you're at and how the lighting is, it can be a great shot or it can be one of those shots that you just be like, that never existed. So I think I would add the, you know, from an educational perspective, add it in, like even if it's literally just in like one of your classes, you're like, OK, we're going to spend 10 minutes now filming the combination we just did.

From the business perspective, again, I think it makes sense. But I also understand that there are studios that are smaller or just don't have the time or don't have the want. You know, for me, as a larger studio, I have, you know, between 400 and 450 kids each year.

So for me, after a certain, right, three locations, so much. For me, it makes sense, or at least I think for me it makes sense. Some people just may not care.

They want to just focus on a certain aspect and leave that to everybody else. So I think that's great. Gosh, OK, second question, as far as following me.

Yup. So Facebook, you can follow me. Ian Howe, easy enough.

Ian Howe Dancer. You can follow my dance company, Apropos Modus. You can follow my traveling dance intensive called Influx Dance, which is also I'm trying to branch off and do an assistant program with that.

You can go follow my studios, which is Pacific West Performing Arts or PacWest Dance. My dance photography is Dance Meets The Eye. And that's also all on Instagram.

My website, IanHoweDancer.com, again, Apropos Modus.com. Don't have a website for my photography, ironically. Inflex.Dance is my one of the many companies, but yeah, Ian Howe Dancer is probably the easiest way just to keep up with me.

Maia
Start there and then you can go down the rabbit hole like me.

Ian
Yes, yes, yes. But yeah, no, it's I guess in the end it's just it's diversified. That's what I would end everything with there, you know, in the notes that you gave me.

I love the fact that you were like, I went down this rabbit hole and I was like, holy my gosh, you do everything. I joke that it's partly out of boredom, which it kind of is out of boredom. But at the same time, it's literally just trying to find the little niches.

Some things are more successful than others. Some things work out great. Some things I've had for years and really haven't done anything with.

But I would say and you know, the photography is part of it. The videography is part of it. It's diversifying yourself, especially as a dancers.

That is the word of the day. I think it's just diversify. Do your things, but diversify what you do.

Maia
Hey, it's Maia again, wrapping up with another huge thank you to Ian. Again, the fact that we sat down to have this conversation months and months ago and it turned into such a long and robust conversation that I had to break it up into two episodes and wait and hold on to this to release it now. I just feel so lucky to have had that experience. I'm so grateful again to Ian.

Also, I wanted to interject here real quick to tell you about my new partnership with dance news daily. If you're not familiar with dance news daily already, you can probably figure out from the name that this is an amazing source to get daily dance news.

Dance news daily.com is the website with tons of up-to-date dance news from all different genres, and it's from all over the world. There's articles about new works being created classes, the latest literature on dance. It's so amazing, but my favorite feature is the daily email.

So on the website, dance news daily.com, you can sign up for free and you can get a daily email that has links to all these different articles from different news sources telling you what's new in the dance world today, obviously with the podcast, it's really helpful for me to stay up to date on what's new in the dance world, but as a teacher, I think it's also so important to steer my dancers towards getting news and reading about what's going on in the dance world. And it can be really overwhelming and they might go to sources that I'd rather they not get their information from. Like I don't want them just going on Tik TOK to get the latest in the dance world.

So to have it all in an email that you can encourage your students to subscribe to, but that you can also just open real quick every morning, scan through, grab what's relevant to you, share it with your students. And it can be like a headline of the week type of tradition that you start with your dance classes and just a really great learning opportunity for everyone. So be sure to check out dance news daily.com and subscribe to the dance news daily email.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about today's episode in the casual dance teachers network on Facebook, or you can also find us on Instagram as the casual dance teachers podcast. As always, I would really appreciate it. If you could go ahead and leave a review for the show on whatever streaming platform you are listening on to help us connect with more listeners and continue to grow the show.

See you next time.