Denis Darzacq to capture the dancers in mid air doesn't use any post production manipulation. He relies on the dancing abilities of the subjects and he carefully controls the shutter speed of his camera to achieve this effect. Shutter speed is the period of time when the shutter opens letting light enter the camera and hit the sensor. Controlling shutter speed can create two distinct and interesting effect: you can blur movement or freeze it.
In this first photo shoot I wanted to play with shutter speed to capture my subjects jumping and capturing them suspended in mid air. To do that I had to use fast shutter speed (>1/125 s) to eliminate as much blur as possible. To do that I tried to shoot in Shutter Priority Mode (S or Tv) to manually control shutter speed, but letting the camera figuring out the correspondent aperture. Because light enters the sensor the camera used for a really small amount of time the camera used the widest aperture possible (smallest f number possible) to overcome underexposure.
In this picture I captured the subject in mid air in a pose that's pretty much a photographic cliche. I used my camera's burst mode to shoot a sequence of photo, so that I could then select the stage of the jump that interested me. To achieve a blur-less movement it required many attempts. The picture turned out without blur usually with a shutter speed of 1/125" or faster.
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I then decided to change pose for the subject, trying to achieve the sense of lightness, typical of Darzacq's photos. In this picture the subject is suspended in air and looks like he is being pulled from above without resisting. The lightness of the pose, like in many Darzacq's compositions, is in contrast with the strong composition of the picture and the surrounding dense urban landscape.
I also tried to change background, because I thought a dense one could distract the viewer. In this picture the horizontal lines of the garage door give the overall composition tridimensionality and make the subject pop out. The surrounding object light the orange cone give a sense of the height of the subject.
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In this first photoshoot - where I dealt with the relationship between time and movement - I focused on many technical aspects of photography. I experimented with different modes and different shutter speeds, apertures and ISO settings and learned a lot about how to balance this trio to control exposure. Even if I achieved the effect wanted inspired by Darzacq's photographic series, I think that because I focused too much on technicalities I missed the artistic and creative side of the artist. Most of the picture look soul-less compared to the ones of the artist. Being more confident with the technical side of photography means that for the next photoshoots I could experiment more with poses, backgrounds and composition: the artistic and creative side of photos. Continuing with the theme 'time and motion' I would like to try blurring movement. Moving on I would like to start documenting time as an unstoppable shaping force and I would like to focus on how photography can make connection with the past through object and places.
