Awesome shot

I recently got to see a couple do a professional Argentine tango routine.  I took photos and here's the best from the set:

These are old family friends Nancy & John Lingeman.  Nancy used to teach ballet and flamenco to my sisters Amy & Sarah.  (Nancy once tried to get me to do flamenco and I've always regretted that I didn't do it.)  They live in this fantastic log cabin built on the side of a hill in Bonny Doon.

I had trouble with this shot because it was too blurry.  The room was dark and they were moving fast and the shot is already underexposed and in jpeg format, which limits my ability to play with it.  There's a fantastic utility in Linux called "refocus" that lets you de-blur an image (way better than "sharpen") but it didn't help in this case.  If you look closely you'll see why: John's teeth have blurred into his upper lip.  Refocus, and it looks like he has a striped moustache.  I already had several great shots from their routine and was ready to delete this picture because I just couldn't make it work.

I tried black & white but the result was . . . eh.  Anyone who's tried black & white photography knows that it's actually really hard; there's a tremendous focus on composition and contrast, and you can't fall back on pretty colors.  (Incidentally, I did get a good black & white shot from this set, but it didn't work for this shot.)

But the composition and pose were so great, I couldn't let it go.  So what does a bad photographer do when the original shot was not well done but he wants to use it anyway?  Tweak the hell out of it.  At this point the colors are so tweaked that you can't tell what it was even supposed to look like originally.  And my fancy vignette zoom blur effect distracts from the fact that the subject matter is blurry too.

Final result: a fun, stylized photo that captures the passion and energy of Argentine tango.