Swingvideo

When this site was created around 1990, digital camera and digital video recorders were not yet available. So the only remaining tool for what I wanted to share here was text.

It is hard to describe dance without using pictures or way better video, and - equally important - music. A passion that is built on movement, social interaction and music, is hard to share with others using just words.

When the very first digital cameras became available, I bought one. That was fairly simple, with a resolution of just 640 x 480 pixels, no sound recording, and with a price of over 1000 SEK. Comparing with inflation since then, I could today (2023) easily buy a decent smart phone for the same money. But the camera gave me a tool to take photos when I was out dancing, immeadetly available for publishing, and it also allowed for extremley short video clips with poor quality.

2001 I bought a digital video camera, using tape for recording. It allowed for good quality videos with sound, about TV/DVD quality (PAL). My first usage with that was to create a video story of my vacaction that year, which I named `Three Islands`. In August that year, after my vacation, we one afternoon took the effort to bring a radio and the camera to my brother`s balcony beside our house, and record ten minutes of dance. It was no corography, we just danced as we use to do, to common Swedish gammaldans and a swing melody. We incorporated that as extra material to our vacation video. The swing video included here is the very last melody of that recording, the swing melody.

The other parts of that dance recording has since been used to complement the descriptions with pictures and video clips.

Two years after that, we made some new recordings at my other brother`s balcony closeby. By then I had prepared music I played myself, which we used for the recordings. Most of these are included as illustrations for the instructions for the dances here.