Dance Ink - Motion Shoot / by Ken Greenhorn

A year ago in September I had the opportunity to shoot 12 of the instructors from Dance Ink dance studio. (I had forgotten I created this blog and forgot to post it). This was a collaboration with Myself, the Dance Ink instructors, Zeroframe Productions, and Hair/Makeup by The Shop. I wanted to do a shoot that depicted 'motion', so I decided to do a long exposure technique incorporating 3 constant lights and 2 strobes. After doing some preliminary test shots, we determined that we needed almost complete darkness (no ambient light), so we moved the shoot to Studio 2 which is in a basement with no windows. My son, Zach (Zeroframe Productions), made a video of the setup, getting ready, and the shoot. See below.

We set up black curtains as a backdrop and black rolled paper as the floor. Three constant lights were set up in a line with a strobe at the end. The dancer would then move along in front of the constant lights in a progression (which becomes blurred, showing the motion) and then a 'pop' of the strobe at the end to freeze the action. As we went through the day, we sometimes popped the strobes 2 or 3 times during the progression to add frozen images part way through the blur. There was definitely a learning curve for the timing as I had to manually hold open and close the shutter while manually popping the strobes in between, all within 2-4 seconds. The instructors were from varied disciplines (Hip-Hop, Jazz, Ballet, Tap, etc.) so it varied the costumes/clothing to add color and style. Below is an example of one of the finished images...Please 'LIKE' my Facebook page (Ken Greenhorn Photography). Please look back for all the posted images.