One thing I've always loved in photographs is movement. I've used long exposures before, but for this shoot I wanted to really focus on this technique. Rose, a dancer, had expressed interest in shooting with me a few months before, but it hadn't worked out. I knew that a dancer would be perfect for this exploration of movement, so I reached out to her and asked if she'd be interested. We actually ended up taking these photos inside a parking garage. I set up a white backdrop (which kept getting blown over yikes) and I asked her to just move around and make some really dramatic movements. I set the camera up on a tripod and set my shutter speed to be open for a whole second. It took some playing around with settings and motion techniques, but we created some really cool images. The editing was a whole other game. My backdrop wasn't huge, so in almost every photo you could see the parking garage. I had to go into photoshop and expand the backdrop which with the blurry edges created by Rose's dancing was no easy task but I'm really happy with the final product. Leaving the shutter open for so long created some really beautiful and abstract images that I think is a really interesting way to showcase dancing and movement in general.
I decided to give the image below its own section because for this one I used a different technique. Rather than capturing a long exposure, I took many photographs in succession over the span of a couple of seconds. Then I went in and chose some favorites across all stages of the arabesque and overlayed them all together using photoshop. I added a bit of extra blur and this is what I ended up with. This is definitely one of my favorite images of the day, and it was a lot of fun trying something new.
