Kosrae Student Organization Dances

The Kosraean Student Organization put together a fund-raising variety show held at the College of Micronesia-FSM - China Friendship Multipurpose Center, otherwise known on campus as the gym.

The dancers included groups other than Kosraean dancers. The dancer above, from here on Pohnpei, is performing a Samoan style dance.

My daughters joined one of the dance groups.

A first public performance for the dance group. The dancers more often perform at family functions in front of relatives. The college students represented a group of strangers for the dancers, and a noisier bunch than the usual collections of aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

Imaging conditions in the gym were atrocious. The gym was only partially lit for the dances, and even then the lighting consisted of a five mercury vapor lamps and six sodium vapor lamps. Balancing the color was difficulty, even with five color balance options offered on the FujiFilm FinePix Z33WP I was using. Adding to the photographic difficulty was the distance from which I was taking the pictures, and the small lens diameter. I was forced to use ISO equivalents of 800 and 1600. Of eighty images, only four were reasonably usable, and then only after some massaging with GIMP 2.6.

A number of students working with digital cameras were getting blank images. Their specific problem: a dancer too far for their flash range. I realized that one could run a modern photography course built around digital cameras, GIMP, and optimizing images for social media. Full automatic mode is not always the optimal option.

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