Recently I was invited by Ivan (a fellow photographer) to join a photoshoot with 3 ballerinas. Of course I was interested as I have never photograph any ballerinas in action before.
At first meet up, there was some issue with the shooting location (apparently we need to get a permit to shoot at that location, to which we didn’t). We decided to postpone the shoot about a week later.
So, on the second meet up, we manage to finally shoot (after getting permit approval from the park management). There were 6 photographers and 3 ballerinas. So we split into 3 groups with 2 photographers to 1 ballerina. Time given to shoot each ballerina was not long, therefore I didn’t manage to shoot much.
As the shoot finished, i went back to download photos via Lightroom. A lot of the shots are repeated by the ballerinas as they had to turn, jump and bend their bodies to achieve the poses they want.
All in, I’ve chosen 2-3 of the best poses done by each of the ballerina. Yup, I’m quite choosy when it comes to good pose and lighting. Here’s an example below of the shot I’ve chosen in raw format and compared to edited version.
Shot with XT4 + XF 35mm F1.4 (1/2000sec at F1.4, ISO 160)
Off camera flash with AD200 (Manual mode 1/64)
This shot was taken around late evening where the sun was about to set in an hour. For this angle, I placed the ballerina’s face facing towards the sun setting direction so that her face won’t be too dark (sun was at the front & left side). I shot with wide open F1.4 aperture as I wanted to blur the background, compensated by the fast shutter speed of 1/2000 seconds with low ISO 160 settings. As for the AD200 light, I set it to manual mode with 1/64 of power and placed it at the back & right side of the ballerina to shine just a bit of rim light around her hair and her dress too.
As for the post processing part, in Photoshop, I cleaned up some dead leaves around the grass using the clone and healing brush tool. Using the Imagenomic Portraiture, I smoothen up the ballerina’s skin. I also added in some yellow and deduct off a fair amount of cyan from the “green” and “yellow” color channel using the selective color adjustment tool. Finally, I added in some contrast adjustment to give the overall look a bit more punch.
Back in Lightroom, I added some dark vignetting to make the ballerina stands out more from the photo… and that’s it!
Below are some of the edited photos that I’ve done with similar shoot settings and post processing.
