For this 4th installment covering dance/motion techniques I’ve used in my almost-ready new book, we will build on what I covered yesterday. In part 3, I talked about using a single long exposure, constant lighting, and the model punctuating the movement with held poses.

For today’s technique, the setup is very similar, the only real change is in the light:

This image was done using a digital projector as a light source. The projector was hooked up to a computer running a “plasma” effect screensaver, which generates animated shifting blobs of colour.

The projector is pointed at the model, and the different colours are recorded as they change based on the location and time of both the model and the image being projected.

This is probably one of the most random (and hit-and-miss) techniques I used. Setting it up was certainly an experiment, but one that paid off well, I think.

Due to the relatively low light output of the projector, it required a very wide aperture and a pretty light-tight setup. In addition to tweaking camera settings, I adjusted the speed of the animation and some other settings to get the effect I wanted. In the end, I had to set the size of the colour blobs to be very large (nearly the full screen), since having too many different colours made it too hard to see the definition of the form.

The animated colour sequences produced by the computer could be changed for something else — another setting on the screensaver produced more lines than blobs, but I found it appropriate for the “digital” feel.

There are a lot of neat possibilities with this setup — remembering that your light source doesn’t always have to be a strobe can lead to some wonderful options.