From a window display inside the China World Mall, the first of many upscale malls which now can be found around Beijing.
Although this was just a quick snap with the back camera of my iPhone 6, I spent a lot of time developing it with Lightroom, including removing reflections from the display glass and those pesky wires holding the tutu in place. (If I knew how to use Photoshop, I might’ve also removed the pedestal.)
Over the past five days that I’ve been posting these photographs of Rush, I’ve also been developing some prints (using Lightroom) that I thought could be okay with a bit of work.
In all five shots, I’ve paid particular attention to the shadows cast by the dancers (thanks to Sue for the suggestion). I also spent a lot of time using the improved spot removal tool to clean-up the background, as well as removing marks from the dance floor, backdrop wrinkles, etc.
The second image is a stitch (via Photoshop) of three photographs. On the final shot, I used the Infrared Lightroom B&W Filter Preset, which I think worked remarkably well with the original bright blue background.
All 25 photographs are now available on flickr.
Please do let me know if you have any questions or comments. 🙂
No, the soft focus on the first shot wasn’t intentional. I do hope it works, however.
I really like the lines of her toe wrapping into his shoulder in the third shot.
I think that the fourth shot is one of my better dance photographs.
Tonight, Shanshan and I went to see the students perform in the main theater of the Beijing Dance Academy. There was a modern piece, followed by Company B (with some returnees from when I photographed it), with Rush as the finale.
After the performance, I was able to briefly show the photographs to Christopher, Feng, and Christopher, who said they liked the shots a lot. I’ll also be sending Feng high resolution jpegs so that he can give the images to the students.
I do like that I was able to capture these images during a rehearsal… that is, not having the dancers posed or using anything but available light.
Technical specifications are the same as with Rush 1. 🙂
I took the two pictures that are blended together to compose this shot during the fifth rehearsal of Company B (see here) I attended.
Since I’d already had quite a lot of photographs from the previous rehearsals (including the dress rehearsal earlier in the day), I was more creative with the shots… looking at different lighting, reflections, and so forth.
I was lucky that the dancer maintained the same pose throughout, and even luckier that I was able to capture the ballerina in roughly the same pose as she moved around him.
