Kathryn @ Torrey Pines

Ok, so more insights on dance photography.

Lets start with silhouettes ( which are apparently harder to spell than to shoot ). Shooting silhouettes is great, mostly because it's easy. Why fight the sun by trying to light your subject, am I right? No worrying about flash recycle times, maximum sync speeds, or all of those other things I hate about using a speedlite.

So it's as easy as exposing for the sunset and you'll get a shutter speed plenty fast enough ( even at ISO 250 ) to freeze the awesome dance action.

There are obviously a lot of ways to retouch silhouettes, but these in particular I haven't modified very much. I would have liked to get even more contrast in the original exposure to make Kathryn's figure silhouette-out entirely but there is a huge bluff at Torrey Pines that reflects the sun back towards the water.

We worked for awhile with this sheer fabric thing and got a few good shots. The wind was blowing hard enough that we had to cooperate with it. It looks pretty cool but I've seen it photographed better.

Note: I spent a lot of time staring at the sun during this shoot which I do not recommend. When I got tired of it I just started shooting from the hip and hand-held just inches off the sand. The wide lens and low angles help dramatize the landscape and dancer.

Heres an alternative using the sun as key light rather than backlight. As long as you keep your model facing the sunset it works pretty well and there are plenty of opportunities for profiles with dance.

Kathryn teaches ballet and it shows in her dance. Shes so trained and reliable that she can reproduce the same leap for me five times so I can get the timing right. And like a good actor, it's great to be working with a dancer who can both improvise and take direction.

And let me mention how freezing it was... We finally had to give up when Kathryn's feet got so cold she couldn't point her toes anymore. She was a really good sport about the whole thing. You can see in the background that this was not a particularly popular time to be prancing around in the surf.

I probably could have kept more footprints out of the sand also but I'm not a perfectionist.