Thanks for the shoutout!@alexiscuarezma @profotousa #Repost ・・・ I like calling this image "multimillion-dollar legs". There's no denying the amount of punishment a ballerina's legs and feet take after countless hours of practice & performing. You can't put a number on the time @seeshevydance has spent in a dance studio. I worked on this image directly with @alexdimattia who's extremely talented. He's a former dancer himself and is also a musician. The goal was to highlight her stance (feet/legs). In order to draw the most attention to her stance with light, it has to have the most visual contrast. I wanted to add rim lights only to her legs. This does a number of things. It throws high lights on the outter back part of her legs, and shadows in the middle of her thighs & shoes. This draws your eyes in because it's not normally what the mind registers. If you draw or paint 2 different shades, 1 lighter and another darker & place them by each other. The mind by default assumes the darker shade is further back. So when you throw shadows where you normally see light and vice versa, it messes with your mind because it's trying to figure out why it looks odd. Essentially, what you're doing is using light to draw attention to itself. That's exactly what I wanted to do here. To accomplish this, I had to elevate her. If I didn't, because of the angle of incidence of the light, it would also throw a huge highlight on the floor from her feet to the light sources. This would complete for your attention which I didn't want. To overcome this issue, I had her stand on a paino stool, which presents a challenge in itself for her. The 2 rim lights had 20 degree grids to control the light but that still wasn't enough. We still had to flag them to get everything right. The upper half of the image was lit with a medium softbox feathered so it wouldn't affect the bottom half. It was also lighting the background. We spent over an hour getting this right. However, ballet is an art of inches & we selected 1 of the earlier photos. Even though the lighting wasn't perfect yet, her stance was flawless. And that's more important with a such a classical and well known dance like ballet. (at Lincoln Center)
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