robin gale cornett (a photographer for babies, children, and families in fort myers, florida) » ballet

Salvage: performance

robin cornett — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:12:48 +0000

Right before my trip to Italy, I shared a couple of promotional images I’d shot for Salvage, a collaborative performance happening in downtown Fort Myers. The (first, I hope) performance of Salvage was last Friday, and it was energetic and stunning. I had the privilege of attending the dress rehearsal to capture images there. Since the performance was an open floor in a large room (the Art Center used to be the post office, back when federal buildings were built to be beautiful), shooting at the final dress was fantastic, because I could circle around the entire stage without worrying about getting in anyone’s way or disrupting the performance. Visually, the show was a rare treat (and a huge change from sunny beaches!): the combination of the dancers’ movements and the lighting was just really beautiful.

I wanted to share a few of my favorite images here with you, but you can see more of them at the Dance Bochette website.

(If you are wondering, a special floor was built for the performance, but my eye was really captured by the dancers’ reflections in the marble floor of the art center. Really beautiful!) The concept and choreography for the show was by Alyce Bochette; the lighting was by Stuart Brown; the show also featured original poetry by Jim Brock and video by Rodney Woolsey.

Salvage

robin cornett — Sat, 01 May 2010 13:01:05 +0000

I was given the opportunity to do some potential publicity shots for Salvage, a show which will be performed in downtown Fort Myers in May. It’s a collaboration of dance, poetry, film, and music. We kicked around a couple concepts, and my suggestion was to create an image which would be very simple visually. It also involved a certain amount of patience on my model’s part, as I experimented with lighting (with the added bonus that my children had to be “helping” at this one due to circumstances beyond our control).

I was especially pleased with the starburst we captured here:

Dancers’ feet astonish and fascinate me. I’m so impressed with their strength and flexibility. Doesn’t her left foot almost look like someone’s hand here?

If you are in the Fort Myers area on May 21, you should come to this performance! More information is at the Dance Bochette studio website.

holiday celebration!

robin cornett — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:37:41 +0000

I never got to share any of my daughters’ ballet studio Holiday Show images on here yet, so I’m blogging them today, admittedly with a dual purpose. If you are a blog subscriber, you may not see the difference in the email or feed reader, so click on through to the blog and you’ll see that things look just a bit different around here.

First, a shout out to Dance Bochette, the studio: this was the studio’s 59th annual Holiday Open House. That is quite an accomplishment, isn’t it? Their spring performance is really something special, in an auditorium with stage lighting and guest artists; the holiday show is a little more casual, at a local church’s gym (hence the backgrounds), but it is always delightful. I love seeing all the different ages perform–they are usually delightful and this year was no different! Click the arrow right there in the center of the picture and enjoy just a few of my favorite images from this year’s show:

The second purpose in this post is to show off my newly upgraded blog! There is so much I could say, and some of it I’ll share for a future post, but ProPhoto Blogs has been my blog theme for over a year and a half now, and the newest iteration, ProPhoto3, came out today! I have to say, every iteration of this theme has been better than the one before it, and they have all been pretty outstanding. Some of the crazy awesome new features include:

built in slideshows (see above), meaning having a slideshow in every post is super easy (before, every post took me several steps). I also don’t have to count out an exact number of images for every post like I did before.
I can have a sidebar! Or not! I’ve chosen to have a sidebar on my home page, but not on individual post pages. I like that I can rearrange the site to have things like my twitter feed in the sidebar, and the tag cloud, so that you don’t have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see some things. I love that I don’t have to sacrifice the yummy big images for the actual post. If you’re on the home page and want to see the pictures bigger, just click on the post title and you’ll get the full page spread.
built in “social media” icons–I like the wood grain myself, but there are some other nifty options, or, if the creative bug strikes me, I can make my own. That one probably won’t happen for me, but it could!
I like gravatars, I admit it. Now I can have them in the comments. Do you have a gravatar? If not, go get one!
If you are really finicky and want to have everything on your blog “just so”, you can. I haven’t even scratched the surface with my site, y’all, but there are places for you to put in custom accent images, add backgrounds to the content area, not just the standard page background, custom post separators, all kinds of things.
And of course, if you want to, you can make everything all lower case. Or not.

If you have been on the fence about buying the ProPhoto theme, please hop off now and get it. You don’t have to know any code to trick out your site seventeen different ways–if you can edit a picture in Photoshop, you can do this, too. Apparently my referral code needs to be updated–when I have a new code, or if the current one works (RCORNETT232), I’ll update that information here. But the referral code should save you $10 (not on the upgrade price, but I’d upgrade regardless. And apparently if you bought P2 since 12/1/09, your upgrade price is only $20).

update: The referral codes are working again, so if you want to use mine, RCORNETT232 (in all caps), that will save you $10. Thanks!

ballet: my girls

robin cornett — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:52:27 +0000

Yes, I have been a bad blogger lately. I have an excuse, I promise! I have a couple sessions I want to blog, and will, but June has been an event month more than a session month. I just finished a solid week of VBS at our church and right before that was my girls’ ballet studio annual Festival of Dance, which I had the privilege to shoot. I’ve been putting pictures on the dance studio website (click on news), but wanted to share two of my girls here, because I’m a proud momma and I can.
My youngest is the siamese cat there at the end of the line.
That’s my girl, there on the right, with the big grin. She struggled a bit all spring with her attitude towards dance, but this weekend, she was firing on all cylinders. Maybe she is a performer at heart.

If you want to see more of the studio, visit their site.

Bochette Dance Holiday Show

robin cornett — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:42:50 +0000

For the past couple of weeks, I have spent quite a bit of my spare time at my daughters’ ballet studio, Dance Bochette, taking pictures of the classes as they finished preparing for their Holiday Show, which was yesterday. It was a lot of fun to watch the girls practice the moves and dances they’ve been studying all fall and I think their hard work really paid off yesterday. I’m still going through those pictures, but I wanted to share the slideshow I put together for them with you as well.