Every photographer has a bucket list of certain things they have always wanted to photograph and one of the things at the top of mine was capturing the movement of dance.

Along with photography, dance has always been a big passion of mine, although I don’t dance as much as I’d like to these days (however you might catch me dancing around the living room until I have that realisation of “oh did I forget to close the curtains”?)!

Well you can imagine my excitement when I got an invite to get involved in a dance photography workshop recently, and not just any dance workshop, dancers performing on aerial hoops and silks. I was excited as a monkey with a peanut machine.

Given the nature of the shoot and the set-up needed for the dancers to perform, instead of the dancers coming to the photography studio we brought the studio to them.  The key to capturing fast moving subjects in sharp focus is to use a high speed sync flash set up, in this case we used high powered Superfast Lencarta 600 strobes which lit the performers at up to 1/2000th of a second.

In layman’s terms, it’s the flash that freezes the movement. Combine that with a superfast shutter speed and you end up with a really sharp image with no motion blur.

There were also additional sets for floor work and portraiture, so I decided to use this as a good excuse to get the dancers to show off their extreme bendiness and flexibility, making for some very interesting portraits.

Here are a few of my favourites from the shoot.