I was in Ottawa last weekend and attended the Dark Urban Cabaret, something I can only describe as not-traditional belly dancing. There was a steampunk belly dancer, and various goth ones as well. Overall, it was a great event, and I really enjoyed it. There wasn’t one performance where they did a movie version of belly dancing with the traditional style music. It was aggressive sometimes, and relaxing other times. I am definitely glad that Tom and Tracey invited me and I finally got to see Tracey perform.

On the other side though, I couldn’t have created a more frustrating situation for this amateur photographer. I constantly was fighting with my camera and my own body in hopes of getting a good shot. I cried as lights were dimmed, and I sighed at my lack of lenses for this type of situation. Some of the shots I took ended up looking reasonable on my camera’s LCD, but once I put them onto my computer, I realized that many, if not all of the pictures I took were garbage. I definitely got to learn a lot about how much f-stops matter, as well as how noisy higher ISO’s can be.

I’m looking forward to my next chance to attend belly dancing events, though hopefully in a brighter environment where I can better capture it.