Circus Performer, Shoot 3

Today I shot with local juggling wunderkind, Kyle Driggs. Kyle performs locally as an associate of the Give and Take Jugglers and practices in the rehearsal space they share with Greg Kennedy

Kyle wanted something that was different from the ordinary “promotional portrait” so we took some more “moody”, almost film-noir juggling portraits.

One of the most difficult parts about shooting aerialists is that the rope suspending them keeps twisting (thankfully, the static trapeze is really static). One of the most difficult parts of shooting jugglers is getting the objects that are being juggled to be in the right place, especially not in front of the face. If I saw the right composition in the viewfinder, I knew I missed the shot because those balls and clubs move pretty fast.

For lighting, I chose two flashes 45 degrees behind Kyle and one 45 degrees off to the side for Rembrandt style lighting with strong rim light. I wanted to keep the light restricted so that we could get some good motion blur when the balls and clubs were out of the zone of light and not being lit.

We started off with some club juggling and I soon realized that I would need to shoot wide. Here’s a shot from the first series.



I really like the expression and how Kyle seems to be communicating with the club.














Behind the back…behind the other back. I slowed down the shutter a lot to get the ghosting and motion blur.










Next we tried shooting from up high to give some forced perspective as the objects gained height. With a wide lens, the high objects would look bigger.

I changed the lighting to hatchet lighting with a strong rim light. I really like the way the light on the balls matches the light on his face.


One of the problems I was having was that I was losing the balls into the shadows high above Kyle. Even with a shutter speed of 1/8 second, there was not enough ambient light to capture the balls. I added another gridded light off to camera right so that the balls could at least be caught in silhouette. The uppermost circle of light is the daylight coming through the door of the studio. The lower circle is from a flash with a grid.

Here's a slideshow of the whole series.

Circus Performer, Shoot 2

I've been looking to take some cool portraits of circus performers all summer. Since the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts is close by, I've been trying to shoot aerialists. Yesterday I shot with T. Lawrence Simon.

I was trying to capture motion, produce some portraits with his favorite apparatus as well as portray his personality.



In this picture, I really liked the use of negative space as well as the serious look he was using. Sort of like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on his shoulders, T. is posing with the hoop, his favorite apparatus.

To keep with the serious tone, I lit this with a softbox high to camera right and a silver reflector for fill camera left. The wall in the background is a light purple which became gray since it was not lit by the softbox.



T. was telling me that the reason he chose the hoop as his aerial specialty was to spin. Even as a child, he loved to spin around. I wanted to catch him spinning, and be able to show motion at the same time.

To do this, I chose a slow shutter speed, in this case 1/20th of a second, and aimed a narrow spot of strobe at his face. To narrow the beam, I attached a grid to the light and I tried to trigger the flash as his face moved around. I have a lot of shots of his back.

Lastly, I wanted a portrait that was lighter than the first one. To do this, I knew I wanted a white background which I achieved by hitting the brick wall behind him with a lot of light. This made the wall go white. I got some reflected highlights on T by shooting with a meter reading that equaled my exposure reading behind him. I then set a light with a grid to that reading and aimed it at his face. Here's the result.



You can see the entire set of photos here