Dance Photography With Flour | After Dark Edu 2014

While I was at the After Dark Edu workshop this year, I had the opportunity to play until my heart was content.  As I walked through the grand hall of the St. Louis Union Station after a class, I stumbled on the end of another class that had a very large group of photographers and I popped in for the end.  This class, led by Travis Gadsby was all about dance photography with flour.  It was so awesome, I just had to take a few shots.  I’ll attempt to explain the setup here.  Keep in mind this is in the middle of Union Station and the lighting wasn’t quite idea, but it was all about grasping the concept.

The Setup

Ideally, to shoot dance photography or motion of any sort you have to use a quick shutter speed and flash to freeze the subject.  Unless you want the blurred look of course.  Here the model was on a huge tarp to contain the mess from the flour.  She would grab two handfuls and go to town.  There were two strobes, one left and one right of model just outside of the field of view with huge soft boxes.  Of course, when using strobes to capture dance photography, or any photography, you must stay inside your sync speed.  Since there were a ton of photographers, we had to shoot and pass the triggers.  Until someone came up with the bright idea of using Bulb Mode.  Whoa!  We actually had the staff of Union Station give us a 10-minute window of semi-darkness by killing most of the house lights.  Then everyone was able to shoot while 1 person triggered the flash once or multiple times per frame.  Dance photography is pretty neat in that you can create something spectacular as the model moves across the frame.  You can see from my shots that the ambient light was still a bit much, but like I said, grasp the concept.