Swing Dynamite

Claudia Petrelli is a Colombian ex-pat who runs a swing-dance studio with her daughter, “Swing Dynamite“. We had known each other via twitter for some time, but never really got together until one of the more social drinking nights in my neighborhood.

She had mentioned how much she liked the photos I had done with my kids, and a few other families, and asked if we could do something like that for her and her daughter. Of course jumped at the opportunity to work with these two beautiful and talented swingers [see what I did there?].

Their studio was so spacious, it was a dream to work in, given I’m usually confined to small and cluttered family and kids rooms. Space allows for distance, distance allows for longer focal lengths, which in turn minimize the distortion inherent in wider lenses and allows for a more flattering image of the subject.

On that day I had forgotten (I admit it!) a critical adapter that connects the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra to the strip light I picked up off eBay (under $100!), thankfully, I had Amanda there that day to save my butt and act as the lightstand and bracket to hold the light in place (seen below). I could not have done this without her and am thankful I work with other very talented photographers. If you get a chance, you should definitely run over to her blog and check out Amanda’s work.

Since Claudia and Natalia are performers, they already had a few costume ideas for our shoot, the only thing I had to do was light it and the scene. To add some visual interest to the background, I took a flsh and blasted it at a fake tree off to camera right and way back in the room. The strobe was CTO’d to make the already orange wall really pop.

We did a few setups and scenarios, but these were my personal favorites of the two. You can see them larger, with more info on the lighting, over on Flickr here and here. Let me know what you think!

Posted on Monday, May 30th, 2011 at 10:23 am. Filed under: Portraits Tags: Dance, Daughter, Mod, Mother, portrait, Retro, Strobe RSS 2.0 feed.