friscoron
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 Edgy Studio Portraits of Dancers | |
Hi all. This is part of an artistic portrait offering I provide to dancers. When I shoot recital portraits and I have dozens of dancers going through my setup every hour, I have to put together a Circle K lighting setup with two lights lighting the background and providing some back lighting on the dancers, and two lights at 45 degrees providing a lighting zone for dancers in the setup. There's just no time to adjust the lighting for these types of shoots, and I prefer to shoot against white for these shots.
But what really need, and want -- whether they know it or not -- is artistic edgy lighting set against black marley flooring and a black backdrop. In this type of shoot, I average one shot every 7 minutes. So when I have a bunch of dancers coming through, they get three shots in 20 minutes. They show me what they're going to do, and then I create the lighting to show off their lines, their power, their beauty. Almost every shot has its own unique lighting.
In these types of shoots, I usually use three lights (Alienbees), with two of them being the big, gridded strip boxes. The third light is usually just that regular silver reflector with a 20 degree grid on it (or more or less, as needed).
I finally talked Ballet Chicago into letting me offer this to their summer intensive students, and it was a huge success.
Here are seven samples from the Ballet Chicago shoot. Comments welcome.
1. I've got the gridded strip box above her and to my right, pointing down so I could illuminate her face and then finger to finger across the arms. Other strip box is on the left providing the cross light.
2. One strip box camera left down low pointed at her. The second one, camera right, pointed down at her at about 45 degrees to provide even lighting across the back of her body.
3. Here I have the strip boxes across from her but slightly in front, as you can see the shadows farther back inside her legs. I wanted to outline her legs, upper body, and hair, but I didn't want nasty shadows across her face with her looking right at the camera.
4. I have one strip box in front of her, way down low and fixed horizontally to go across her body. The second strip box is behind her, up higher, just providing a fill light.
5. One strip box, camera right, slightly above her. The other strip box on camera left.
6. Pretty easy here. One strip box on camera left pointed at her face and along her body lines, one strip box behind her pointed right at her legs.
7. Some might feel that I went too hot on her hair, but that was intentional. I wanted to bring as much attention to her hair as she receives with her body/pose. If I felt I could have pushed the contrast even more, I would've done it. One strip box camera left lighting up the front of her body. The other strip box, camera right, had to be slightly behind her as I didn't want her long hair to block the light to her legs and body. This one was pretty tricky to get just right.
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