2nd June 2016
I met Sara after seeing one of her piece that she choreographed at the Norhern School of Contemporary Dance featuring my friend Kit King. I thought it was very funny and the way she had woven in the humour was priceless. We had a chat afterwards and I wondered what it would be like to work with a choreographer during a dance shoot. So we gave it a try. Laura was roped in later. I was to find out later that she is a house mate of Flow.
In many ways this shoot was a return to what I doing with Rhiannon when I first started out photographing dancers except I now had a lot more experience in photographing dancers. The basic equipment was pretty much the same except the key (front light) was turned up more. I wanted to strip this back to the bare minimum, no special tricks with the flashgun or lighting. This was all about dance and the dancers.
I did not have an agenda in terms of what want for this shoot. I just turned up with a few props like scarves, fans, long pieces of shiny material, a Chinese umbrella and let the girls let rip. When I was setting up I turned around and noticed that Sara had wrapped one of the scarves around her torso like a sash. I liked it. She was messing about and we had not even started. It was also my first shoot in the lighting studio for a while. A few black boards covered in material helped adsorb any stray light so that cut down on a lot of post processing work.
Sara started off with the umbrella. I was a little concerned because during her piece that I saw, they broke a number of them. This one is only decorative and part of me wondered if it would survive the shoot. It did.
Sara and Laura swapped in and out throughout the shoot. That suited me fine. It gave the other dancer time to think up a move and time to play behind the camera.
Three photos of Laura then once again a change back to Sara and orientation of the camera from portrait to landscape mode.
Throughout the shoot a full-frame camera with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens was used. The camera was hand held. The lighting set up is below.
The camera was set to ISO 2000, f/4 and 1/400th of second. Next time I may boost the power of the main light so I can dial down the ISO and use a large octagonal softbox with one of the diffusers removed. The back lights would be reduced by a stop too.
Most of the post processing was done in Lightroom. A bit of cropping, lens correction adjusting exposure.
The rest was performed in Photoshop. This was mostly dodging and burning (lightening and darkening specific areas) and sharpening the detail.
This is the first time we had collaborate together. The resulting photographs were different from what other dancers had created using the same props. The lighting set up did its job too. It was a shame that we did not have that much time for this session there was a few things I would have liked to have tried like them letting go of scarf during the move so it is left hanging in mid air.
Sara and I have discussed doing a duo shoot with her boyfriend Nuno. I have not covered a shoot based on lifts and the like. So we will have to arrange that.
The original plan was to do hold another shoot the next day with Sara, Laura and Flow. Sara pulled out because it was too late and clashed with a rehearsal, Flow was exhausted so it ended up with it being Laura and myself, but more of that in the next blog entry.
Thank you ladies for being fantastic and fabulous dancers as well as people. It was great working with you and seeing how all of this came out. One thing I absolutely adore about working with students from the NSCD is the number of nations I have worked with. Sara is Portuguese and Laura is French. So far my tally include Danish, Hungarian, Greek, Chinese and Spanish dancers not to mention indigenous ones.
Please leave a comment below and let me know what you thought of the photographs.
Please leave any thoughts, comments, questions or just say, "Hi!" (not literally) below. I really do appreciate feedback. E.g. What is your favourite photograph and why?