Last Wednesday, Focus Photography Workshops (a meet-up group I recently joined), put together a photo shoot with Vikkah Windmeyer – a talented young aerial gymnast. It was my first experience with this type of a shootout, where a number of photographers with different skill levels get together for a photo session, networking, learning from one another and just hanging out and talking about photography. I had a great time and I’m definitely looking forward to attending more of these shootouts.
The night cityscape provided a really cool backdrop for Vikkah, who performed a variety of acrobatic moves for us to capture. Being used to nightlife photography in dark clubs with constantly changing lighting conditions, I’ve become accustomed to shooting with the flash at very slow shutter speeds to freeze my subjects and blur the motion in the background.
It took me a little while to unlearn that technique on this shoot, since we were using continuous hot lights and to capture Vikkah’s motion in clarity, I had to keep my shutter speeds above 1/100th of a second. This, of course, meant that I had to raise my 7D’s ISO to 1600 and even 3200 on occasion. Luckily, that camera handles high ISO noise very well, and with a little help from Adobe Lightroom, I was able to get some relatively smooth shots. Looking back, I should have probably kept the shutter speed even higher to get a bit more sharpness out of the images.
Be sure to check out my Flickr gallery to see the entire set, and watch the video at the end of this post for some behind-the-scenes clips!
Below are some behind-the-scenes snapshots from the shoot.
Views from our gorgeous location, shortly after sunset:
Setting up:
Below left: workshop co-organizer Mark Alison explains the next setup. Below right: co-organizer Nathan Rigaud with the portable smoke machine.
And, here’s a short behind-the-scenes video clip from the shoot (watch the HD version on Vimeo):
