aerial straps

At the beginning of the month, I had the awesome opportunity to work with Abby again, but this time for her specialty dance talents. She does Aerial Dance with straps and a hoop (not photographed yet). She is amazing at it! If you want a unique act at your next event, or even a private lesson, ask me for her contact info!

I got to use a couple of my new "backdrops" for this shoot. By that I mean, I went to Fabricland and bought cheap material and sewed it together all make-shift style. The red and purple I bought are Rayon Twill... so they're probably going to be wrinkly a good lot of the time, but they look neat. The black is Valour, which makes me laugh, but it's actually pretty good for a backdrop.

I wanted the background in these shots to be flush with no folds or wrinkles, but the only way we could hang it resulted in a sort of theatrical curtain look. I don't hate it, so it's all good.

red curtain, originally uploaded by avalilly.

pointe, originally uploaded by avalilly.

half a heart, originally uploaded by avalilly.

extend, originally uploaded by avalilly.

impossible, originally uploaded by avalilly.

riley, originally uploaded by avalilly.

aerial, originally uploaded by avalilly.

We actually shot these in her garage. Her unheated garage. On a day where it was -30 C out. She was a great sport, as was her little cousin who came out as well. Abby teaches private lessons for children as well, if you happen to be interested! It's a really beautiful dance form. I can't imagine how much strength it takes though. I can't even touch my toes without bending my knees, so this is definitly not in the stars for me!

She does a routine with a partner on her hoop. I really hope I get a chance to shoot those photos! It sounds so awesome.

These photos really make me wish I had a good lighting kit though. We just used a common work/flood light and in some of them my external flash fired at the ceiling. It will suffice for now, but it really really makes me want to learn how to light properly.

(Also I did the makeup for these. Can you tell I had just seen Black Swan?)

learning to flash

So, as I mentioned before, I bought myself one of these for christmas. I finally stopped procrastinating about it and just tried it out for a client shoot the other day.

I was happy to see that it's dedicated to my camera, so I didn't actually have to pretend to know how to use it and fiddle around until it did something. Basically you install it onto your camera's hotshoe and away you go. All I had to do was turn it on and it examined my camera settings and fired whenever I pressed the shutter button on the camera.

Now, as convenient as that is, I do still intend to learn how it works so I can use it for more complicated set ups, but for now I'm pretty pleased that I could be an idiot and still have it work for me.

I did a quick couple before/after shots to see what the difference was:

As you can see, a pretty decent difference in lighting. I still don't like the "flash shadow" that shows up, so I did my best to minimize that throughout the shoot. Because this flash can swivel around in all directions, I had it pointed at my reflector to the left of the camera. I tried it on the silver side first, but that was too much contrast for this particular kind of portrait, so I switched it over to the opaque white side to give a lighter diffusion. It's still a bit stark in some of them, but for the most part it did what I wanted it to.

After changing to a horizontal frame for some shots, I started bouncing it off the ceiling instead. My ceiling isn't necessarily the best for this since it's that textured kind with all the bumps on it, but I liked the result none the less.

The ceiling bounce offered a better version of the kind of light I was looking for. There's enough extra light to get a brighter picture, but without the flash sacrificing the natural light coming in from the window.

So, nothing terribly complicated at all. Just a matter of finding things to bounce it off of and hopefully avoiding the ghastly flash shadow that makes everything look like a cardboard cut out. In the future hopefully I'll be able to report on using the flash's manual settings and maybe try using it off the camera. It did come with a stand! For now though, I'm happy. Winter is so overcast around here, it's hard to get a good amount of natural light shining in through the windows.

Also, that's my kitty Noelle being her usual nosey self. I believe she was looking to have an affection attack, but we were kind of busy.

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Here are a couple of the final images:

business abby, originally uploaded by avalilly.

business abby, originally uploaded by avalilly.