A friend of mine suggested doing a shoot with her where she wanted her yoga poses have motion in the image. We never got around to doing the shoot but many months later I met Alex on Instagram. She does contortion and the idea came back to me. I suggested the idea to Alex and she was all for it. Problem was I never attempted it before and had no clue how to do the shoot.
A few days before the scheduled session I found a Adorama YouTube video on dragging shutter. Wow this is exactly what I needed to do in the shoot. So like I always do I watched a video and felt I could do this. Who needs to practice in advance. It can’t be that hard.
The day of the shoot with Alex I did a few test shots using a stool but wasn’t really getting the result I wanted. The problem was I needed a moving subject. I setup the studio with 1 strobe light, my Godox SK400II with a 120cm Godox octagon soft box. I set up my Sony A7iii on a tripod with the Godox X2T-S trigger attached. I was ready to go.
Once Alex was warmed up after an hour of stretching we gave it a shot. I had my camera set to f5.6 and the shutter speed to 1 second. This is normally my setting for F-stop and I knew from watching the Youtube Video I needed a slow shutter speed. the result was ok but Alex really needed to move quickly to get the desired result.
We quickly learned that we needed to keep the shutter open longer to give her time to move enough to get what we wanted. I set the shutter to 2 to 4 seconds for the rest of the shoot. This gave Alex enough time to move while in positions that would be very difficult and dangerous to quickly move.
Now we got the correct time for movement the next challenge was to get the exposer and focus correct.
The longer you keep the shutter open the more light hits the sensor so shooting at f5.6 was letting in to much light. I dropped this to f9 for a few shots then to f16 for the rest of the shoot. This fixed both the exposer and focus. Because all the lights in the room was turned off my autofocus was not working. So I needed to manual focus. Using f16 ensured I didn’t need to be spot on to focus on Alex face and if she moved forward or backward she would stay in the field of focus.
Now maybe you're wondering how I froze the movements like Alex arm’s in the photo above. If you keep the shutter open then everything should be blurry as her arm’s are moving.
This is where the trigger on my camera comes in. There is a test button on the Godox trigger that will fire off the strobe every time its pressed. Because I had my Sony A7ii on a tripod and I didn’t need to refocus often because I was shooting at f16. I had my hands free to manually press the test flash button as many times as I needed to within 4 seconds.
In the photo above my camera settings was set to ISO 200, f16, with a 4 second shutter speed. All the lights in the studio was turned off and the Godox Strobe was on its lowest brightness setting.
Now we have the settings out of the way I asked Alex to not move any part of her body but her arms. Starting from the down position and move them outward till they were over her head.
I pressed the shutter button then manually pressed the test flash button 5 more times before the shutter closed.
This was a really fun shoot to do, Alex was a great model and it felt we both were figuring things out as we went along. Which we were. We got some great images out of the session, and I learned a new shooting skill. I definitely will keep this in my back pocket for future shoots.