Back in March I had the oportunity to photograph beautiful ballerina Claire Beauchamp at her ballet studio in Toronto.

I arranged the photography session with Claire as a self directed portfolio piece – I had been doing a lot of industrial and medical photography at the time and needed a break to photograph something a bit more elegant and dynamic – hence a beautiful ballet dancer.

Ballet Dancer Claire Beauchamp at her studio in Toronto

The ballet studio had the typical wall of mirrors, a fairly light wood floor, white ceilings and light blue walls.  Going in, I was planning on shooting a high-key series by overexposing the background to white.  I brought some random black backdrops with me to flag off the mirrors – one of which was a black on black damask pattern Bad Sass Backdrop.

Lighting was a three light setup using Elinchrom strobes – two Westcott stripbanks for rim light, an Elinchrom Rotalux Octa as the keylight and a set of Nikon speedlights for the background.

The high key setup was working OK – but the photographs just didn’t have the punch and drama that I had in mind.

So we went with Plan B – the black on back damask Bad Sass Backdrop.  Problem was, the backdrop was only five feet wide, so we had to improvise a little.

I had always planned on putting the fabric portions of the photograph together as a composite, so I ended up building the entire backdrop as a composite photograph as well.

Here is a little video that shows all of the layers of the finished image in Photoshop – it was a little tedious to align the damask pattern – a lot like doing wallpaper!

Any questions about the setup, lighting or post-production editing – hit me in the comments.  Cheers!

If you want to find out more about us – follow us on Twitter @blurMEDIAStudio, or add us on Facebook / Google Plus or check out our portfolio on 500px.

Cheers,

John-Paul Danko

blurMEDIA Photography

Toronto Dance Photographer

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

blurMEDIAPhotography.com
info@blurmedia.ca

905 818 5711