NoHo On Dance Night.

On Friday nights we dance, usually well into Saturday, at a fourth-floor ballroom in downtown Northampton.  The warm-up starts around 8:30 with DJs spinning slow music to stretch and move by, and by 10pm the place is a riot of free souls churning together a mix of free-form/modern, disco, country swing, contact improv and fill-in-the-blank.

I suck at this, having no clue about how to dance.  But if the music grabs me (as is frightfully often the case,) I can be danced, disappearing into another dimension and emerging from my trance surrounded by slack-jawed onlookers muttering stuff like, “Jee-zhus, Dude, how did you DO that??? ”

To which my standard reply is, “Wha…? ”

Then, as the Witching Hour of One approaches, the music slows and Susan and I spiral into each others’ orbits like a pair of neutron stars, generating a wave of heat and gamma rays which sends all but the heartiest of observers to the water cooler, fanning themselves and gasping for air.

But this post isn’t about that.

It’s about trying to get a handle on the urban landscape and interior photography.

So this past Friday I arrived around 7pm and snapped a few off.

Here’s the building across the street from Dance, at the corner of Bridge Street and the fabled Pearl Street:

I found balancing the low-light urban nightscape and the intense pin-point illumination difficult, and was grateful for the opportunity to practice.

Here’s an interior shot, one in which the shadows struck me more than the pedestrian objects which cast them:

That was in the dance building’s central core, a glass-topped light shaft with an overall geometry which I found compelling:

This architectural feature was the reason I brought my camera to town, having noticed it from a fourth floor window on the upper right the previous week.

These may be the last interior shots for a couple of weeks, as I’ll be largely without an interior to shoot.

Which is, of course, another post entirely.

😉