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.