Capturing Dance Movement
Lets Dance
With Jessi
For this shoot I was joined by two fellow photographers to try to capture some dance moves with light trails of the model
Our model for the event was the lovely Jessi Athira who has considerable experience of different forms of dance
The Idea
Jessi was going to do some simple dance moves going from left to right in front of a black background
The camera shutter would be open for anything from 1.5 to 5 seconds while she moved
During that time, she would be lit by the light from the LEDs which would create blurred trails of her movement
Finally, the flash would fire at the end of the exposure, creating a frozen image of Jessi on the right… well that was the idea anyway!
The Set up
A large wide black backdrop was the first thing we set up, followed by a black cloth on the floor.
The lighting consisted of two continuous LED light panels on the left, and on the right, a Godox AD600 speedlight with a gridded stripbox
Finallly, to prevent the light from the LED panels spilling onto the backdrop, we used a large black screen placed close to the LEDs
Cameras welre all on tripods
Props
Jessi wore a vibrant red flowing dress
We used coloured, and white silks, to add some different colours and vary the images
Camera settings
ISO 100
Aperture … f5.6 and f.6.3
Shutter … we experimented with 1.5 to 5 seconds
Two seconds seemed about right
Light settings
The LED panels were on full power
The Godox Ad600 was on 1/4 power
The Shoot
Getting the light to just how we wanted it took quite a time
Firstly, we just used one LED panel, but this didn’t give us ernough light, so we added a second.
This threw out a lot more light so we had to introduce a black screen to prevent light falling onto the background.
With the LED panels positioned, we then tested the power required for the Godox Speelight on the right
This was quite difficcult becuse it was going to be impossible for Jessi to hit exactly the same point every single time.
After a bit of trail and error we settled on 1/4 power for the striplight
Editing
The images straight out of the camera needed quite a bit of editing
Take a look at the before and after images below
Edting took no more than 10 minutes thanks to all the tools available in Lightroom
Cropping the images did away with a lot of the distractions, and then taking down the shadows gave a much cleaner look all round.
A few more tweaks to contrast, saturation, and shadows, and it was done.
LED panels + black screen
Stripbox
Edited
Out of camera
