Shooting dancers can be one of the most daunting photographic subjects but also one of the most rewarding in terms of the final images captured. Dance can be an unforgiving subject, and unless one delves deeper and tries to understand the movement, the choreography, the piece, and how to capture the light hitting the dancers, it will prove tough to achieve award-winning imagery.
When gazing at the photo series Ballet on Film by photographer Lisa Cho, it's natural to become enraptured by its charming conveyance of elegance, perseverance, and depth. The self-taught photographer -- who began her career in her 30s -- aims to translate her love of cinema and "beauty" through the lens of her treasured Yashica 635.
London-based photographer Neal Grundy's latest project looks like dance photography, except the images don't contain any people. Instead, each one shows the graceful, flowing forms of fabrics in motion. The project is titled Dancing Fabrics.
In 1987, choreographer Margo Sappington came to Houston to set her dance "Rodin, mis en vie" on the world-famous Houston Ballet at the invitation of Artistic Director Ben Stevenson. Not knowing who she was, but attracted by her energy and persona, I introduced myself.
Photographer and cinematographer Jeff Hutchens recently filmed a pair of dancers using a thermal camera. What resulted is this ethereal short film titled "X, Y" (Note: certain parts may not be work-friendly).
The PLI.Ē Project is a photo series that shows ballet dancers around the world wearing hand-folded paper dresses. It's a collaboration between Montreal-based photographer Melika Dez and paper artist Pauline Loctin (AKA Miss Cloudy).
I spent close to a decade of my life as a sports photographer and during this time it never crossed my mind to shoot dance. My dance photography all began when I was asked by a friend who was auditioning for a dance program to help with her audition photos.
Karen X Cheng—the viral video maven behind this fun gravity illusion and the donut selfie—put her hard-earned dance skills to use in a new video shot with an iPhone 7 attached to a stabilizing gimbal. The trippy results are quite captivating.
Photographer Kyle Froman has had a rather unique career journey. Before becoming an acclaimed dance photographer, Froman was himself a dancer the prestigious New York City Ballet.
With a new exhibition on the work of French artist Edgar Degas opening soon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Harper's Bazaar commissioned photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory of the NYC Dance Project to recreate famous Degas ballet artworks as portraits of dancer Misty Copeland.
DCinematic of Hong Kong shot this 2-minute-long dance short film, titled “LUNA,” using …
Here's something you don't see very often at weddings: a choreographed dance involving the photographers. At a recent wedding in Albania, the bride and groom came up with the idea of doing an organized dance with their sharply-dressed photographers and videographers to open up the dance floor. You can watch the 3-minute routine in the video above.
Photographer Lois Greenfield has spent the past 35 years of her photographic career exploring the idea of movement and its expressive potential in photos. She has become well known for her elegant photos of flowing photos of dancers in motion.
If you have a hard time making sure everyone’s looking at you when capturing a group photo, perhaps you …
UK-based photographer Bertil Nilsson's project "Intersections" is a blend of two photographic subjects: urban landscapes and dance.
If an art director approached you and said, "we want to capture two people dancing on the side of city hall," you might think he was crazy. Then again, you might just give it a shot and wind up with something wonderful.
Timelapse projects involving one photo or video per day have seen a surge in popularity in recent years ever since videos such as Noah Kalina's everyday went viral. Matt Bray wanted to do something similar to Kalina's project... but different. He set up a camera and captured himself doing the exact same dance in his room for 100 days, and then turned it into one impressive time-lapse dance.
Former ballet dancer and professional photographer Jesús Chapa-Malacara has two great passions in life: yep, you guessed right, they're dance and photography. These two passions collide in his recent Dance Prints series, a beautiful motion photography project that, with your help, he hopes to take to the next level.
The past year saw a mini-boom in musicians discouraging or outright prohibiting fans from taking photos at gigs, pitched mainly as a "pay attention to the music" measure. But now the trend is attracting a sort of venue where reckless flash photography would only seem to add to the experience: electronic dance clubs.
How good can you get at something in 365 days? If you're former Microsoft exec Karen Cheng, pretty darn good. Her goal was to learn to dance in one year, and she spent that year documenting the experience and showing her progress right up to her final impressive performance in a San Francisco subway station.
This experimental video shows what you get when you combine dancers, light-painting, stop-motion, and a 360-degree camera rig. It's like eye-popping popping that's the product of cameras rather than extremely skilled dancing.
"Choros" is a beautiful experimental film by Michael Langan and dancer Terah Maher. It features a single dancer layered 32 times, which each layer slightly offset in time from the previous one. The "visual echo" technique turns a single woman into a "chorus of women," and transform the dance from single movements into waves of motion. The 13-minute video is set to the song Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich.
In 2009, NYC-based headshot photographer Jordan Matter began photographing professional dancers performing moves in and around New York City for a project titled "Dancers Among Us". When the photographs went viral online, Matter began taking similar photographs in major cities around the world. The photographs show dancers leaping and holding poses in all kinds of environments and situations, from a picnic in the park to workers shoveling snow.
Slit-scan imaging can make for some pretty trippy photos and videos. The technique involves capturing (or displaying) one "slit" at a time through a frame, causing motion to take on a bizarre appearance as each line in the image shows a slightly different moment in time. French filmmakers Adrien Mondot and Claire Bardainne used the technique a couple of years ago for the video above, which makes two dancers look like human Slinkys.
German photographer Geraldine Lamanna has a great series of photographs titled "Powder Dance" that captures the elegance and powder of dance using white powder. Inspired by the music video for the song "Rolling In The Deep" by Adele, Lamanna coated dance instructor Olivia Maciejowski and two her dance students with powder, and then had them bust out their moves for the camera. The resulting photographs are meant to show "echoes" of the movement.
What do you get when you cross a camera, dancers, and a gigantic 59-foot-tall kaleidoscope? “The Power of X”.
Here’s a super creative video that attempts to capture 100 years of East London fashion, dance, and music in …
Who needs an uber-expensive Phantom camera or fancy slow-mo software when you can fake the effect with dance? This doesn't have anything to do with photo gear or software, but we found it interesting since we've been sharing a lot of slow motion work lately. These are music videos for songs from retired MMA-fighter Genki Sudo's album "World Order". The name of the dance group is "World Order" as well.
Israeli singer-songwriter Oren Lavie teamed up with photographer Eyal Landesman to create an imaginative music video for "Her Morning Elegance", which was recently nominated for the Best Short Form Music Video Grammy award.