Photo Of The Year: Arts & Entertainment

Arts and entertainment is a big part of what we shoot at the Daily Pilot. Every so often we get invited to shoot at some of the finest venues before a show opens to the public. We often get to go behind the scenes to see how productions are put together.

It’s a good test of our photographic abilities since these assignments are so colorful and well lighted. They are fun to shoot because pretty lights, shadows and expressions are set up for you. It’s a challenge to get something different, though. They are fun to photograph because all you have to do is shoot when all the elements are right.

Usually at a studio, museum or the Orange County Performing Arts Center, all the elements of a good photo are there like lighting, motion, color, expression and graphic lines. You just have to know how to line them all up together like Kent Treptow did while shooting the Project Bandaloop dancers at the arts center.

He took a very different kind of show and made it look very different in the process. There were floating dancing people on the side of a wall. He waited until the perfect moment where the dancers were all in different positions of the dance, all while capturing their shadows on the wall. A nice dancer-in-motion shot with even better graphics to along with it. This is the best arts and entertainment photo of the year.

—Don Leach