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How to take great photos of a ballerina in the studio

After getting some awesome photos of Sarah dancing at sunset on Lake Champlain, we met back up at the studio to create some abstract, clean and simple photos to complement the dramatic outdoor ones.

We started on a “fashion gray” backdrop, but when I looked at the camera, all I wanted was a nice clean black backdrop to keep the focus on Sarah dancing. After I switched backgrounds, the photos started to look better. I was using an extremely simple one and two light set up. The two lights I used were both SP-Systems, 3200 Excalibur. Both lights had softboxes on them, one using a 2’x3′ softbox, the other a 36″ hexagonal softbox.

I was looking for soft, directional light. I tried to eliminated any unwanted light bouncing back into the scene by putting up a black muslin backdrop blocking a white wall on one side (the other side I would just have to deal with what came bouncing back).

Most of the lighting was aggressively side lit. I was attempting to get high contrast, good definition along the edges, and good fall off of the light as it wrapped around her. The lights were placed between 70-90 degrees from the camera. Enough to get the edge lit, but with a little spilling over the front of Sarah to get some definition.

The lights were triggered with a radio slave.

Shooting black on black can cause a few issues, namely in post production trying to separate the two, but it’s easily overcome with a little selective burning.

When the aim is to take abstract photos, I generally try and look for slices of a whole shot. I try and focus of the curves and angles of the arms, legs, whatever makes interesting angles. Then I shoot and shoot. Changing things up as much as possible. I found myself moving the lights just a hair forward and backward as I would lose Sarah in deep shadow, or get her too evenly lit.

Even with an ‘easy’ shoot and setup, it’s always challenging to get the right shot.