Dance Photography Recomendations

I am planning a shoot of a dancer. I am planning on using my D70 at

ISO 1600 with a 85mm f/1.8 prime. I also have a 50mm f/1.8 and a

telephoto (slower lense).

 

I was thinking of using a combination of strobes and tungston spots

to freeze some of the actions (i.e. face) while emphisizing the

montion in the body by using slower shutter speeds.

 

Any recomendations would be appreciated.

You'll always obtain best results with a pose held (relatively) still.

If you want to get mid-air jumps yes, strobes are good, possibly with

rear-curtain flash. Perspective might look best with your 85/1.8.

Are you considering mimicking the lighting that the dance is normally presented in?

 

The mainstay of dance lighting is lights directly from the side, pretty low. I'm focussing a

dance show just now, and the side lights are at 1, 3, 6 and 8 feet, which is typical. This

give you nice highlighting of the limbs and nice definition.

I'm planning on purchasing a new camera and would like to ask if anyone knows what minimum sync speed is needed to take photos of dancers in motion? I'm thinking of the Canon EOS 20 with a sync speed of 1/250sec.

Thanks

If you're thinking of shooting performances, I don't think sync speed is a consideration.

You'll want to avoid using the flash. First, because you want to capture the lighting, and

second because the flash can really throw a dancer off.

 

If you're asking about shutter speed to stop motion, it may be lower than you think. 1/

60th will often show a little blur in the extremities, but be sharp enough for most of the

body. Faster is better, but you'd be suprised what you can get away with.

 

When using flash, shutter speed won't matter-- the flash is short enough to stop motion

regardless.<div></div>

Here's one shot at 1/180th. Notice the hair.

Thanks for the feeback! I am interested in freezing dancers in mid-air in a studio environment, against a white, grey or black backdrop. Based on your last comment, I suppose then that setting the camera shutter speed to 1/250s (highest sync speed on Canon 20D) and using fast strobe flash (1/1000s or 1/2000s) will achieve the motion freeze effect?

Right. If the dancer is lit solely by the stobe it wouldn't even matter what speed you used.

(Have you seen "Doc" Edgerton's photos?) If you use flash and other light, then you may

get some blur from the other light when using a slow shutter speed. But, you will also get

a perfectly frozen image from the flash. That's what second-curtain flash is for. You can

get an image of the dancer perfectly clear and frozen, but with motion trails following.

 

Anyway, my point was that it doesn't take extremely high speeds to freeze most

movements. Not as high as I would have thought. Looking at some performance photos

that I took at 1/60th, the motion is stopped, but the image is blurred by camera

movement. At any rate, if you're using digital it's easy to experiment and see what works

for the effect you want. The fact that the shutter speeds are recorded with the image is so

helpful.