Murakami Haruki is one of my favourite writers, so it's nice to be able to use the title of one of his books as a blog entry. I would also definitely recommend reading "Dance, dance, dance" if you want your mind expanded and bent into strange shapes.

Anyway, the photos herein are not anything like as weird or wonderful as Murakami's imagination. They're from the Domannaka Festival, a huge celebration of dance held in Nagoya every year in August. Why they chose August is anyone's guess; I saw one person being tended to by paramedics after collapsing in the heat and it wouldn't surprise me if there were others. It's blazing hot here at this time of year.

The festival runs literally all day, from 9 to 9. The last two hours are the "final", where the most popular teams compete, but it's a pain to get photos there because a) it's utterly packed, and b) there are huge stage lights flashing on and off which do terrible things to your camera's metering. I got a few, but my favourites are all from the daytime.

I was using the D7000 with an 80-200 F2.8, and while I was shooting a friend's performance

 http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151049227079811.439373.597959810&type=1

- I started to mix up the ISO and aperture settings. I'd take a number of shots at ISO 100 and F2.8 to isolate the subject and blur the background, then I'd go to a higher ISO and much higher F-stop to get everything in focus. It makes for a nice combination.

So here are some of the shots from yesterday.

Plus a handful of the night shots which came out passably:

Thanks for looking, feel free to leave comments!