Ballet

I am fortunate enough to know a couple of girls who are, among other things, very good ballet dancers. So while reading another (Joe McNally’s) blog, I was inspired by a photo of his to create some similar photos of my friends.

These obviously aren’t your standard dance photos. Basically I needed to have a completely black background and two directional light sources, one on each side of the dancers. Aylin and Rachel were happy to redo their same moves over and over again while I popped off test shots and dialed in my lights for the “real” shots.

When it was all set, the photos started looking really cool- I was able to underexpose the background to make it look black, and the hard directional light on the girls had a very dramatic effect. Being the oaf that I am, I know nothing about dance at all- I just told the girls to do anything they thought would look cool on top of the X I taped on the floor. And the photos did most definitely come out looking cool.

For this setup, I used three flashes, all on manual, full power. Two were firing from the left side, and a third fired from the right. I could have used only one flash on each side, at a lower power, but that’s not the way I did it that day. Using my bargain bin wireless flash triggers, sometimes the right side flash wouldn’t fire at all... but surprisingly, that’s when some of the best looking photos happened! (see bottom photo) Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win.