As I mentioned in a previous post, in July 2021 I travelled down to Invercargill to be the host and assist at a Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ) dance workshop. The workshop was being run by Auckland fashion photographer AaronKey and was held in a large hall that had very limited natural light.

We set up three very different lighting setups and the participants rotated through them. As each station was designed to produce a different look I am going to cover them in three separate posts.

I was expecting to only be helping with the session but we had a participant pull out so I ended up taking part as well so that the rotations worked properly.

Aaron works for sunny and through its connections borrowed a whole lot of lighting that he bought to the venue. It took us nearly 2 hours to set up the three lighting positions.

The first set was on a plane white seamless background and employed a single light shooting into a 7 foot umbrella. This set up was designed the freeze motion with a high key look.

The first dancer tended to move across the stage or rotate in one spot so I was shooting her at f5.6. The second dancer was leaping so I changed to aperture to f8 to give me a better depth of field.

Under natural light shutter speeds of 1/100s or 1/125s would not be fast enough to freeze action. However when you are using studio lights this is not an issue as it is the duration of the flash that freezes the subject. Shutter speed only has an impact on how much of the ambient light comes into the image.