The Ballet Phase - spinny things, twirls and standing on tiptoe.

So we grabbed our dancers (not literally but you know what we mean). Let’s talk about that bit for a second because getting dancers was not something we’d done before and we had no idea where to actually find such things being the non social media creatures that we were. After a bit of Googling we ended up on StarNow - a bit of a professional talent recruitment/casting site. To be fair after managing to craft an exciting looking advert we did get quite a few interested dancers. The art of this though was knowing who actually was a dancer and who merely danced at weekends at a local club. Lots of checks, and cross referencing show reels became the norm.

Dancers all booked and confirmed and with more dance dresses than you could possibly imagine in a bag, we started doing that thing again with a constant light and a flash in our studio.

The first thing we learnt - ballet is very very technical and precision and form are key! We lost count of the number of times the dancers looked at the back of the camera, pulled a face and said ‘no, I’m doing that again. My toe wasn’t pointing right.’ The movement of dresses and skirts became very important as well. What we were trying to achieve was that sense of movement and blur as opposed to static nice images of ballet poses. It was a lot of trial and error and to be honest we were coming away with probably a handful of images out of maybe 500 which we thought worthwhile. The other thing was (as can be seen in the image below) we wanted to move away from the black background and try and make something a little more colourful and painterly. That created its own challenges as we needed to ensure the colours didn’t clash. Blues and greens were not great in reflecting light and creating the sense of movement but reds and yellows fared much better. And again we used the flash and continuous light combo to both freeze and blur.

Ballerina - Karya Daru

The editing bit was also interesting !! Photoshop became my new best friend. The raw images were boring - let me be frank especially as the colours and tones were now important aspects I had to think about. The movement was being captured but it just missed something to make things pop a little. Then came the texture overlays which really made a difference. Don’t get me wrong we downloaded a lot and it took a while to work out what was good, bad and indifferent. But we carried on this vein for a few months - messing around with ballet, learning a whole lot about fancy French terms and creating something interesting.

But slowly and surely things began to evolve. We became less interested in making photos that looked like baller and more interested in what happened with the fabrics, the body, movement and light came together and took over. That’s where it got interesting. More to follow……