The Dancer: A Walkthrough

Recently I finally organized a shoot that I've been wanting to do for quite some time--a classical dancer session. While I had a few ideas in mind for static portraits, what I really wanted to do was illustrate the movement of the dancer across the stage. Of course, there's a few ways to do this. Here are some of the things I considered:


1) Raise the level of the ambient light in the auditorium, shoot with a long shutter speed, and possibly do a rear-curtain flash to bring attention to the ending pose of the dancer. This would leave a somewhat ghostly trail leading to the finishing pose of the dancer.


2) Lower the ambient light, use several strobes or monolights with radio triggers set to low power, and fire my 7D in a high (or low) speed continuous burst. As I'd have to be using the flashes at low power, I didn't think the small shoe-mount flashes would give me as much punch as I wanted for the speed that I'd need to be shooting at--which meant using monolights, which I was certainly ok with. However, I honestly didn't want to spend the amount of time in post-processing to combine all the images into something that worked.


3) Lower the ambient level as much as possible, shoot with a long shutter speed, and use a shoe-mount flash in stroboscopic mode to trigger optically slaved monolights. The monolights would give me a sufficient amount of light at low power settings. This would freeze the subject's movement every time the flashes fired. As we were shooting in almost complete darkness (aside from a tiny bit of light coming in from a door leading to a hallway), the ghost trails caused by the ambient light would be minimized.


So, in the end, I chose #3. I had my assistant point one of my old Quantaray flashes at the back of a monolight. The flash was set to stroboscopic mode. I would say, "One, two, three, go!" At that time, I'd trigger the shutter on my tripod mounted 7D (set to about 4 seconds, I think), my assistant would manually trigger the flash (because I could not radio trigger the flash in that mode), and the dancer would begin her movement across the stage attempting to finish the routine before the final flash went off. I chose a shutter speed longer than it took the flash to complete its cycle to give myself a cushion with timing issues.


As far as the lightning setup, I had a monolight with a softbox to the left, a monolight with a Softlighter II to the right, and a monolight in the back providing rim. We had to play around with the back monolight in order to get it to see the flash pulses from the other two lights. In the end, I positioned a reflector with the white side angled toward the back of the monolight. When the other flashes went off, the reflector would bounce the light into the optical sensor of the back light.


The dancer was fantastic throughout. We tried the shot many times before I finally captured one that I felt came close enough to what I had envisioned. Keep in mind she was moving across the stage in almost complete darkness while bright flashes pulsed. I think it took her a couple of hours after we wrapped to stop seeing spots. :-)





Here's the final shot:



http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6185/...0a93bcb2_z.jpg





Here are a couple of static shots from the day:



http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6072/...e7c204d6_z.jpg


https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-1...0/IMG_3382.jpg

This is very cool. I like the end result but would be really curious to see it done successfully with method #1.

Good shot... Well done Sean.


Wally

Very cool Sean, I would have liked to be with you and helped on this one.


I look OK, in a threethree(I don

These shots are fantastic! Your dedication and hard work (and hers) really paid off!