I finally put the images from the Pageant finals online. You can find them here. Personally, I think, because there are so many shots, over 800, it's best to view the slideshow. Just click on the slideshow link, set the interval to 1 second and watch the show. It's almost like you were there, or would be if I didn't have to delete so many shots because they were blury or out of focus, but like I explained before, the photography conditions were rough for a novice like me. I'm happy any of them came out to be honest.

The finals were really good. Lots of very talented dancers. The results were somewhat surprising, at least to my amateur eye. I really thought Nadira, a tall, elegant, stunningly blond dancer from Seattle was going to take the title, but she finished second to a local dancer from Oakland named Shabnam, a tiny bundle of frenetic whirling dervish energy. The judges are valuing a whole set of criteria based of their collective years of experience that I can hardly begin to comprehend ranging from music, costuming, finger cymbals and choreogaphy. It's much more complicated than you think.

Anyway, the Pageant was good fun despite the problems with the program. I really enjoyed taking these shots and am reasonably happy with the results from my first time shooting anything indoors. I hope you like the photos. Please let me know what you think.
I would have put all the images up earlier, but I had run out of bandwidth on my Flickr account. I can harly believe it myself, but somehow I managed to put 2 gigs of images online in May. Mostly this was because I didn't want to resize any of them because I wanted Flickr to retain the metadata and also have to the largest resolution images on the web in case, I don't know, I ever needed them or my hard drive really crashed or whatever. It's a really tedious process, getting them all online, giving them all unique and relevant title and tagging them with keywords so I can search and sort them.

Flickr is really a great service, one of the few things worth paying for on the web. The only thing that I wish Flickr would enable in the next version is to have "subsets". Right now you can create sets to organize photos, which is great, but I have some sets that have a large number of photos, upwards of 1500 in one case, and it would be really nice to be able to subdivide the sets. It would keep everything nicely organized and make it easier for me and anyone else to view the photos. Flickr, are you listening?

That's it for harping on Flicker and that's definitely it for belly dancing for a while. Now back to regularly scheduled programming.