I seriously have no idea where this entire year has gone. It seems like only yesterday that it was January and now November is upon us! Lots of stuff has been happening and for the most part, it was to do with work, work and more work. I’ve also for some reason gone back to school to get certified as a personal trainer. Complete departure from my entire working life, I know, but I felt like it was just something I had to do. One thing that I still am doing is shooting pictures, but have not had the time to actually blog about stuff that I have shot. Maybe I didn’t feel like they were blog-worthy, but I did do a shoot a couple of weeks back that I think I should blog about.
If you have been reading previous entries here, you would know that I have been shooting for the Travel Art Dance Company for a little over a year now. Just doing random rehearsal photos and all, but the dancers have all been preparing for their biggest show in a long time. I have been approached by Meah to do a series of profile shots of the dancers for the show. Nothing too crazy, just pretty normal portraits to go with a little blurb about their individual experiences as actors and dancers. The show that they are doing is called ‘The Black Rider’, based on the album of the same name by Tom Waits. It is a really dark sort of fairytale and we thought we might just run with that for the profile images.
I wanted some moody shadows, so I basically used the one light setup and raked the light through a brollybox across the front for all of them. It was all done pretty damn quickly as it was rehearsal day anyway and I only had a limited amount of time with each of the dancers. Pretty happy with the results. I had to adjust the lighting based on the characters only slightly as some of them were playing the devil character whereas the others played many other different roles. The thing that I didn’t really have trouble with was the expressions and characters from the dancers considering the fact that they are so used to performing in front of strangers 
All images are lit with one Sb-900 into a brollybox. Some of them were on a light stand, others required a voice operated light stand, mostly because the wind picked up halfway through the shoot and the brollybox was in danger of taking off together with my Sb unit.
For more information on Travel Art Dance Company, go to their official site or ‘like’ them on their facebook page. For more information on the show, go to The Black Rider facebook event page
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