Parker A Grimes Photography

Canyon View High School’s dance concert will be on December 17th and 18th this year at 7pm. You should go. I’m not ashamed to admit that I love dance concerts.

This is the poster we came up with for the winter concert. I love the tradition we have going of doing a photoshoot specifically for the poster each concert. It is fun and challenging. We shot this last Saturday and made the poster on Sunday and printed it on Monday.

For those of you that care, I’ll go into a little detail about the shoot. See below.

The Shoot

We did this the proper way. On white seamless paper to get the pure white background. There was no need to extract them from the background with Photoshop because the background is pure white. Also notice the subtle reflection/shadow beneath the dancers. Without that, they would look like they were just floating. The reflection grounds them, makes it seem realistic. That was done in camera, meaning it wasn’t Photoshoped in. I didn’t have a perfect vision of what the final poster would look like during the photoshoot. Or after it for that matter. I knew I wanted flowing fabric and flipping hair. My direction to the dancers was “do some jumpy stuff.” My  wife is the artistic director for all of this, so ultimately she gives the dancers the directions. I will tweak what they are doing if things aren’t looking right to me like move a little to the left or right, arch your back more, keep your wrists straight, etc. Then it is all a matter of coordination, timing, and knowing when to push the shutter release.

There are three lights. Two pointed at the white seamless to turn it pure white and the main light. The main light was a silver reflective umbrella backed up pretty far away from the dancers to spread the light as much as possible. That also meant it had to be firing at full power. We only had 30 minutes to work with and we got it done.

The poster is made up of two images. The two dancers together is one image, not a composite. The faded image is a crop of one photo.

Here is the image of the two dancers on its own.

The second image. I really liked the curvature of the dress and the position of the right hand and left foot. That dictated the cropped position in the upper right portion of the poster.