The dancers couldn’t be more wonderfully intricate, a flying jigsaw puzzle, beautiful pieces all. The flash approach couldn’t be simpler. Two raw, zoomed Speedlights. No shapers. Just two small flashes, supported by Avenger c-stands, each positioned about 45 degrees off the camera position, right and left. Basically, a copy stand.
Rarely light like this, because I am usually trying to soften shadows a bit, and I almost never cross-direct what effectively is two main lights. Until I saw the large white scrim at the back of the stage. A huge white surface, with tons of room for shadows to scamper around in playful fashion. The constant light through the Lastolite Tri-Grip is a small LED on the camera position, as Cali on our crew was shooting some video.
The one finesse part of this is playing with the angle of the approach of the flash, and how deep or shallow the exposure is on the resulting shadows produced. No real science to it, just experimentation. Shoot, adjust. As always.
Finals on this: 1/250 @ f7.1, ISO 200. Gear used: Nikon D500, 16-80 DX zoom, 2 Sb-5000 Speedlights. There’s also a short and sweet little video about this series shot by Michael Cali up on YouTube.
More Dancer Diary tk….
Masterful as always
Besides the obvious job well done, this appears to be a perfect teaching tool for us to bookmark. My first action when reading that the shutter speed was 1/250 was to scroll back up to check for motion blur. Fortunately I was still scrolling when I realized it was flash with no ambient to speak of. Which is much faster than 1/250 of course.
A great example of that property of OCF.
Very cool.
Jeez Joe, another mind blowing shot!
Do you young guys reading this blog realize McNally used to do this stuff with flashbulbs and film… Then, before that flash powder and glass plates… Then, before that he drew pictures on cave walls. It takes a long time to get this good, be patient
Thank you so much to this post