We often are called upon to find file photographs, these a pictures taken from previous events that we keep on hand in our archives. We have millions of images saved. I went looking for pictures I took last year at a battle of the bands competition and as I looked through the folder of around 20 saved images I stumbled upon this picture. Sometimes when the lighting is poor we have to use a flash--and sometimes....well no all times I wish I didn't have to use a flash. Natural lighting is so much better in my mind. Flashes tend to flatten out details and, though they do record the subject, they don't record the subject as they appear--so in a sense its a lie. One thing I do when I use the flash is I try to create movement by letting the shutter drag a bit. This means I use a slow shutterspeed and let the movement of me taking the picture and the subject's movement record however it will. This is very serendipitous and often leads to uninteresting and unusable images. This picture, though unusable in the paper, was interesting in how the subjects repeated. I can't remember now what I did, but somehow i got multiple pops of flash or there was a strobe from the stage that helped me get this repetitive pattern on these dancers at the foot of the stage. The streaks at the top are just the house lights recording the movement of my camera which apparently I moved either upwards or downwards as I pushed the shutter. This can be fun to do by twisting the camera too to create even funkier movements of the lights etc.... Meadville Tribune file photo by Richard Sayer