I found my inspiration for artistic dance photography through and with Lois Greenfield. A few years ago, I fulfilled a long-cherished dream of further training with Lois in the midst of the vibrant city of New York. The contact and friendship with the dancer Steven Vaughn also originated in New York at that time. Visions and ideas emerged for my personal future work and for my photography school. So I created my own fine art dance portfolio and developed a special dance workshop for fotoschool.ch.

Teamwork and timing

The photographic capture of dance and movement, this "pas de deux" of dance photography, has been my great passion ever since. Particularly exciting and challenging for me is the uniting of movement and the capturing of that which is virtually invisible to the eye. When creating my dance photographs, the joint working process and communication with the dancer team play a major role. With Steven, this worked from the beginning. He is a fantastic artist. The collaboration was perfect; I could tell him my idea for the picture and he immediately knew how to implement it. A final point that invites experimentation and play is the additional material: in the picture "sitting in the powder" it is simple flour that is thrown into the picture on command by the assistant or by the dancer with his arm movement. Now "only" the timing - the right moment to release the shutter - had to be right.

"Living the dust behind"

The "Pow(d)er-Shooting" took place after an official dance workshop weekend in a private setting. The shared joy of experimentation between the dancers and myself was unique and highly professional. The exchange of ideas, the communication among each other and then the realisation went smoothly.

"Flying in the dust"

The equipment consisted of two broncolor Scoro 1600 S WiFi / RFS, 2 flash generators, two Pulso G 1600, one Unilight 1600 lamp, two softboxes 30 x 180 and one Octabox 150 cm. The complete system was set up in the open air. On the one hand for cleaning reasons but also as a pure safety measure against flour dust explosions! Be careful when using flour in closed rooms: strong flash light can cause the air saturated with flour to explode. The pictures were taken in just nine attempts. Not a single series shot.

The confluence of my photographic image ideas, the top equipment from broncolor, the use of almost 500 grams of flour as well as the professionally implemented dance-like movement and dynamics, the exact timing - everything fit. No image montage, just a slight retouching of the background, the brightness and the contrasts.

Procedure / camera settings

With my Phaseone I set the ISO to 100, shutter speed 1/1600 to reduce the ambient light as much as possible, aperture 11. The shutter speed of the camera is not decisive. The firing time of the flash, however, is. The flash freezes the flour particles and makes them visible. In these photographs, the broncolor flash unit with t 0.1 achieved a firing time of 1/4000; the individual flour particles become visible and are not photographed as "fog". Since I needed relatively high power with the shortest possible firing times for this kind of artistic dance photography, I used two Scoro. Once again it became apparent how important it is to have absolutely reliable camera equipment and flashes. That is why I have trusted broncolor and Phaseone for a long time.

Christian Weymann

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