Yesterday’s post covered multiple-strobe firings in a single long exposure. For today’s post, I’ll just talk about the most simple technique, and get back to more complicated methods for dance/motion photography in the next few posts.

The most basic setup doesn’t involve any fancy tricks or equipment. The earliest images I shot that are included in this book were done with just a hot-light, no flash or strobe. With not very much light, I was usually shooting with a relatively wide open aperture, and a shutter speed just fast enough to get rid of motion blur and camera shake.

Of course, sometimes just extending the exposure time a little can be enough to get just a little bit of motion blur…

Really, when getting dance and motion images this way, it all comes down to the model’s pose. The pose needs to impart a feeling of movement. Sometimes I can add to that feeling through cropping — adding or removing empty space so there is a more of a feeling of the model moving into or out from the edges of the image.

When editing, there’s a bit of a balancing act between cropping/framing for the feeling of movement, and cropping/framing for aesthetics of the lines and balance of the image. For this book, I chose to make all images full page, with no border. This led to some images I initially picked not looking quite right once forced to a certain crop, which was disappointing when I had to decide to not include them. But it also led to a number of images becoming stronger or more interesting once I was forced to think about fitting them to certain size.