I rented a photo studio for two hours to shoot my old tap dancer and choreographer friend whom I shot last year as well. At that time I was using small speedlights and had very little concept on what I wanted to achieve. Now I had my plans.

The reasons of the shooting were:

• Basilio González from Barcelona, Spain found my other tap dance pictures and he invited me to take part on a tap dance photo contest
• my friend still needs some pictures for his Web site
• I wanted to practice with big strobes

The concept of the pictures were to try to reproduce Platon’s style. If you look through his pictures you’ll notice that I’ve stolen even the poses.

For the sitting poses I used one Hensel 600Ws strobe with a huge octobox from camera left to light my model and a similar strobe with a honeycomb grid on it to light the background. I was also experimenting with two Nikon SB-800 speedlights snooted and directed to his shoes, but to be honest I can’t really recall whether I used them or not for these final pictures.
I used my 17-55 F2.8 lens for this because I wanted to emphasize the shoes in the foreground with the distortion. The exif says that the focal length was at 23mm. I could not go below that because the edges of the paper background started to appear.

For the standing poses I used only one strobe: the one with the octobox. It was slightly behind and above the camera. The focal length was 38mm and the aperture at F8.

It was quite a surprise how easy it was to “work” with my old friend. Whatever I told him he did it and was able to repeat it as many times as I wanted. When I mentioned it to him he said: “I’m a dancer. I got used to do things that I’m told to do.” He is a Professional with capital P.

Any suggestions on which ones to send to the photo contest?