While most Americans are traveling, camping, having backyard barbeques and drinking themselves into a three day slumber on Memorial Day Weekend, a small but enthusiastic group of belly dancers have been meeting in Northern California for the past 32 years to celebrate their art form and compete for the crown of "Belly Dancer of the Year".

I had been hearing about "The Pageant" for years. It's an occupational hazard of dating a belly dancer. There are two things that will happen to you if you are lucky enough to date a dancer. The first is that you will have lots of incredible sex. The second is that you will see lots of belly dancing. Lots and lots of belly dancing. A tremendous amount of belly dancing.

I can't tell you how many festivals, restaurants and private parties I've been to since I met Jennifer back in 2001. I've seen hundreds of dancers. We broke up a long time ago and yet I still find myself dragged to this stuff. I enjoy it, in general, but sometimes it gets a little much, as would anything. I thought Belly Dancer of Year would be the apotheosis of this overexposure, but I was totally wrong. I was mesmerized.

I had sort of vested interest, since I was conscripted to design the program for the event. I put tons of work into the damn thing and was looking forward to seeing it printed. But the printer totally fucked up the job and when I saw the programs yesterday I wanted to kill. When you put so much work into something and somebody else fucks it up, it's tough to deal with. The pictures were all printed way to dark. Somehow the title font was printed in black so you couldn't see part of it. The program cover was printed at a slight angle so there was some of the white paper visible above the picture. Because the internal pages were printed so dark, it was hard to read the text. From my perspective it completely sucked so when people came up to me to compliment the program I really had to hold my tongue. I was embarrassed. I didn't want to take credit for something that looked that bad. That said, the promoter of the pageant, Leea Azizz, was beside herself with joy about it, so who am I to complain? Next year we'll find a printer that understands the concept of "proofing".

I got over it and settled in to watch the competition. Rather than find myself bored out of my mind as I expected (there were 21 performances in the solo category alone), I was consumed with taking pictures of these incredible dancers. So many of them were so good, I don't know how the judges are going to separate the top 5 or so. They managed to whittle down the field to 10 finalists who are dancing this afternoon. There were some surprises, but for the most part, the dancers I thought were best made it through.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to take pictures in a dark theater without a flash. The challenge really comes from finding a compromise between sharpness and dynamism. You want the shots to be as crisp and in-focus as possible. But you don't want to totally freeze the action because you'll lose any sense of movement. Therin lies the trouble.

The dancers are almost constantly in motion, so if you want to capture the movement of a veil during a spin, invariably, because the dancer is also moving, the whole composition will be out of focus. So you really have to concentrate on those moments when the head of the dancer is still and everything else is flying all over the place. It's a challenge.

Because it's so dark, I have to shoot at the widest possible aperture (f2.8 in this case). The result is that the depth of field is incredibly shallow and therefore so is the margin of error. If you focus on anything, like a veil or a sword, that is a little closer or further from the face of the dancer, she (or he, but mostly she) will be out focus enough to ruin the shot. It's a very delicate operation.

You have to find the right balance between shutter speed, film speed and white balance that gives you the best results. What makes it tougher is you can't just find one combo that works because each dancer, with variations in skin tone and costume brightness, is completely different. I don't know if I found the perfect settings, but I tried. You can see the results . I spent a few hours culling through the shots, deleting most of the bad ones and posting them on Flickr.

I'm headed back today for the finals. Honestly, I'm surprised how much I'm looking forward to it.