Dancer in flight
November 20th, 2007
Last week I took a bunch of my studio gear down to Ohio U and set it up in one of the rehearsal studios at the School of Dance. This gave me a chance to test how my current studio setup works for photographing dance. I took the biggest backdrop I have and all my strobe power packs. This let me shoot at ISO 100 instead of 1600 and allows the dancers to do things that are too extreme to try in a performance, things that they can’t really recover from gracefully.
A lot of dancers signed up for the chance to do this shoot and I think we all had a lot of fun. I learned that I need a larger background and probably some more strobe power. My Novatron units seem to have a fairly long flash duration which allows some minor blurring of very fast movements. I’ve written to Novatron tech support asking what the actual flash duration is on my units, but they haven’t responded and it’s been long enough I’m assuming they won’t respond. I’ve tried searching on line, of course, but haven’t turned up the information. But I can see from some of the photos from last week that they have a relatively long duration.
I also wanted to try out several different lenses with this setup and see what worked best. I ended up using my old 35-70mm f/2.8 zoom because it gave me some flexibility on cropping, kept me about the right distance from the dancers and handled the somewhat too small background well enough.
I’ll post some more from this shoot and I’ll get around to posting more shots from the concert as well. For now here is dance student Liz Dunlap in flight. I particularly like the shape she has created in mid-air here.
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