Shooting it: Dancing Queen (Megumi)

Location – Somewhere in the dark… who cares where!

Lighting

Some words about the lighting, I’m not using any main light in this shoot, all I have is the two strip lights at both sides, set at about the same power. From the left side I’m having a nikon SB-26 with a 90×20 gridded softbox, and since I wanted to have the same thing from the right side, but I have only one strip light, I had to addapt my 80×60 Softbox with a couple of bungee cords, and make it narrower, which was a pretty easy thing to do, and I still do it when I go on some locations! So here I am shooting with 2 strip lights, and 2 flashes. As we were shooting in complete darkness (well, we actually had a street light to which the left strip-box is binded again by bungee cords, because of the wind) there was no way to use any auto focus, so I set the camera pretty low on a tripod (as I wanted to fix the location) and then I just had to click the shutter while she was dancing. To mention a few words about her dance, well we decided to use a white costume to make some cool contrast with the lighting I was about to use.

Gear

I am using my Canon 5DMII with a Canon EF 135mm f/2.0 L USM lens, and as you can see the settings it is set at wide open aperture, F2! I haven’t been much worried about not focusing properly, and I wanted to save my flash power as much as I could so I could shoot anytime I wanted while she was dancing. My shutter speed is 1/160th, which is the fastest I can use when I’m using more than two flashes on my full size body camera. I am triggering the flashes with a Pocket Wizard II Plus attached on both of them, and a Phottix Atlas trigger on my camera body. It was a bit windy, and I was worried to leave my stands unattended, as I didn’t have assistant for that shoot, so I had to bind them to the lamps next to us just in case using bungee cords.

Post-Processing

Obviously the photograph is a composite of 5 images. The important thing was to shoot consistent, so when I go to post, I have 5 images with the same exposure, which will make it easy to stitch them into one. I wanted to kind of show her movement, and different moves, that’s why I decided to get a few shots together. Well, after I got all the shots, I opened them as separate layers, and then I only had to adjust the positions of the single shots. I had some of them fliped horizontaly, as I thought that would be better for the final composition. The background was in pure black, which made it easy to just add it in the missing segments, and make it as a one image. And the final local adjustment was to delete some small segments that remained in the background like distants lamps, and also to create the path that she is supposed to be walking. I think all the edit took me no more than an hour, icluding the selection of the photos to be included.

In the end…