Dancers Portraits

Another one of my ideas was to photograph portraits of dancers as they are, so no emotion and no movement, pretty much the opposite of what dancers are about. When they perform they perform with emotion and passion so I wanted to capture the opposite of that. My aim was to capture them as they are so girls with no make-up and have them sit there so they become a little bored and you start to see the emotion of emptiness but when the girls arrived they have put make-up which I had asked them not to.  I still decided to capture them as these where practise images as I was unsure whether this would work or not

As I began to capture the dancers, I asked them to relax which they did but they didn't have the emotion of emptiness as I hoped and looking at them I feel they look like just standard portraits images and have no further/deeper meaning to them. 

I used two lights either side with a soft box and a flash to light the dancers, so it lights the performers but brings out some highlights such as the collar bone in the image below 

Overall, I felt that I was happy with the outcome of the images. They are good photos but the meaning behind I wasn't feeling the project myself, so decided to use this as leaning curve and change my idea but still stick with dancers. 

Below are the portraits I captured from the shoot. 

Below is a contact sheet from the portrait shoot. I tried two sets of lighting, the soft box and flash lighting then two tungsten lighting either side to give the dancers shadow but I found it gave too much shadow.

Overall, I am glad I captured these images as it was an idea of mine so I'm glad I was able to try capturing portraits and may try it later on and try different techniques such as having one person in at a time, making them wait for longer and make sure the girls have no make up and maybe think about what clothing they are wearing as well so it does not stand out as much, maybe to have a head and shoulder shot with no clothing so you focus more of their face.