While I am waiting for the proof copy to arrive, I’d thought I’d take time over the next week or two to go into a bit of detail about some of the different techniques used to capture images for the dance/motion theme of this book.

Strobes are a wonderful tool for freezing motion, but with normal short exposure single firing, that “frozen” look can strip away some of the feeling of movement. By using multiple firings of the flashes, we can capture multiple poses in the same image and thus depict a progression of movement.

The above image is single exposure, no composite image Photoshop tricks. It is done with a long exposure (probably 4 seconds), and manual firing of the flash units several (three, for this image) times. The three main “poses” are when the flash fired, but you can see some fainter ghost images which come from the ambient lighting in the studio and the modelling lights on the flashes. In order to keep the background dark, the ambient light has to be low enough to not illuminate the backdrop.

Getting the exposure right takes a little bit of work, but being able to check the results on the digital camera make it not too hard. First, I’ll figure out the length of the exposure — depending on the amount of movement desired, 3 or 4 seconds may be too short to complete the movements, and it would have to be longer. Then the balance is in finding a power level on the strobes that illuminates each pose of the model brightly (but not too bright as to blow out detail) and an aperture that keeps the background relatively close to black.

Generally, I’ve got the camera mounted on a tripod, but that’s only the keep the relative position of the flashed poses the same — but moving the camera between flashes can add or remove the overlap of the poses as they are recorded.

The real fun is when we can get the strobed poses to “interact” with each other. These are the really magical moments, since you don’t know exactly how it going to turn out until after the exposure is complete.

Using the same technique with a lighter background is possible, but the effect is a little different. With the dark background, the poses overlap and build on each other, but for this example with the lighter background, it is the darker shades of the poses that hold back the recording of pure white light, so the only the overlaps contain detail…

Tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll have another post for you with another technique from the new book!