Hey there! Back by popular demand is another How I Got The Shot post! We had a great time with this shoot, and I really love how the final image came out. It is my hope that showing you this behind the scenes view gets you to think outside of the box for your next shoot! If this blog post inspired you, we would love it if you would send us your shots, or post them in our Facebook group!
In this shot, we deviated from our normal setup for shooting in my studio. The main difference being that we boomed the camera all the way up to the ceiling! We used the same stands and pole that we use to put up our 12’ seamless paper and used a Manfrotto friction arm to secure the camera to the pole. We made sure to have a separate backup safety mechanism in place–in this case, sturdy rope securing the camera to the pole as well. We had the camera prefocused and tethered into Capture One Pro so that we could remotely trigger the camera.
We laid out a length of seamless dark gray paper and then got both the dancer and the paper wet. This caused the fabric to stick to the dancer and the paper to take up the water, giving it that interesting wrinkled look. If you guys end up doing anything involving your dancer getting wet, always make sure to have warm clothes, a blanket, or towel for them to wrap up in between shots to stay warm!
We then proceeded to set our main light, a gridded 14 x 56” strip box where we wanted it. Using the “clock system” that we use here every day (and referenced in our last blog post), we had our main light at about 5 o’clock behind the dancer. From there we tweaked the pose until we found something that we all liked and then fine tuned the lighting. Then I looked with a critical eye to see where my light was falling on the dancer and noticed that some areas didn’t have the exposure that I wanted, so we ended up using three additional Einstein heads with 7” reflectors and 30 degree grids to fine tune the light to fill the darker places that needed more light and achieve an overall balanced exposure.
We are holding a special weekend here at the studio totally dedicated to water shoots! Keep an eye out for those shots and BTS Instagram stories!
Thanks for checking out this How I Got The Shot blog post! I hope that it encourages you to branch out and try something new! We would love to see any shots that you all do that were inspired by this post! Please share them via email or our Facebook group.
