Yoga is a new one for me, though it strikes me that, as a photographer who shoots fitness, yoga has got to be the most visually graphic and artistic practice normally associated with “fitness”… and it makes me wonder why I haven’t shot any before this?
I recently had a chance to work with Sanieh, an Austin based yogini. Though the world had yet to know, Sanieh had been voted as one of Austin’s 10 Fittest people for 2010, and she wanted to capture some updated pictures for her website, knowing that people would be seeking her site out once the Austin Fit Magazine issue when the announcement dropped (and it just did, in the August 2010 issue of the magazine). Before anyone gets uptight, no, I didn’t know about the Austin’s Fittest accolades until anyone else outside the magazine did. (and, kudos, Sanieh! Well deserved!)
Her goal for the shoot was to capture the feel of her motion in an outdoor, but somewhat urban setting. This was right up my alley, in that quite a lot of my experience has been shooting moving subjects, and I’m pretty good at picking up on the timing of the movement I’m trying to photograph. Timing, of course, ends up being the difference between a great shot, and … “meh, throw it out…” Of course, being a yoga kaumaara (ha! look it up!), there was going to be a lot to learn in a hurry in the middle of a shoot. We decided to work at the Long Center for the Performing Arts, with a 6am start time, to take advantage of the morning light. The Long Center has some great features for this kind of work, including a great place to see the sunrise, and some interesting column architecture that would lend itself to having Sanieh’s form juxtaposed on top of it. Another bonus was that I could work in Strobist fashion!
I’ll admit, the morning did not get off to an auspicious start. Being that I’m used to still being asleep at 6am, I don’t suppose that’s too much of a surprise. Let’s just say, I discovered that you can get f/2.8 at ISO 800 out of an Alien Bees AB800 in a 60″ Photek Softliter … with the black travel cover still in place over the AB800′s flash tube! Oh boy… Figured that out, and we got moving from there… Luckily, no damage done to the poor AB800.
Luckily, that was the only wrinkle, and we managed to get some really nice shots in about two and half hours of work, including one minor costume change, and a total of three discrete locations on the site. Most importantly, we both learned quite a bit and have ideas on how to approach more shoots in the future – this won’t be the last yoga you see grace these pages, I’m thinking!
Some technical gibberish… I only remembered to take one setup shot of our middle location (below), but I can describe the setups for you a bit. The shot that opens this post was our first location. It was lit by two sources – the aforementioned AB800 in a Softliter at camera right, and a bare Nikon SB80DX at camera left (zoomed to 35mm or so). The SB80DX just provided a subtle fill, and isn’t readily apparent in the shots.
The second location leveraged those cool columns, but we had overcast skies so there was no contrast at all on the architecture. The columns were just a flat, dirty grey. Blech. In morning or afternoon sunlight, those columns really come alive. So, what you can see in the setup shot is I’ve again got the AB800/Softliter combo at camera right, and then two SB80DXs (zoomed to 105mm, this time) at camera left, each lighting a column to provide a little depth to those otherwise dull columns. That worked out very well, actually, just providing enough interest on the columns to make them a cool design element in the shots.
We’re not done sifting through these images, yet, and I’ll be publishing more in the near future (yes, there’s that third location I mentioned that you haven’t seen, yet…). For now, here’s one more from the first location. Enjoy!
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