I was invited to shoot a working dress rehearsal of the ballet Rush at the Beijing Dance Academy on Friday.

Unlike when I shot Paul Taylor’s Company B at the Academy, I wasn’t familiar with Rush, nor did I have the luxury of watching numerous rehearsals as Richard Chen-See put the Company B together.

The good thin is that, as I noted above, Friday’s dress rehearsal was a working rehearsal, complete with numerous notes and run-throughs. This meant that the usually 24-minute ballet was rehearsed over a space of three hours, which gave me some opportunities to capture some of it correctly. I shot well over 1,000 frames, which I whittled down to 284 at the time I’m posting this blog.

Out of those, I’ll be posting four each day from the twenty which I thought were okay. They’ll be posted in order taken.

It was a real treat watching Christopher Wheeldon choreograph the ballet, and Christopher Stowell stage it. (Thanks again to Feng and Regina for giving me this opportunity.)

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All shots were taken with my Nikon D300 with an MB-D10 battery pack. I alternated between my 50 mm f/1.4 and 85 mm f/1.8. ISO ranged from 3200 to 2500 to 1600.

The lighting was, well, intense. Not only for their regular settings during the ballet, but because they were also undergoing adjustment. I spent a lot of time developing the photographs using Adobe Lightroom 5.4, and know I’ve got more work to do.