Cirque de Glace
It was a superb shoot – enormous fun and an incredible challenge. Shooting for two full days for compositing was a new experience. Almost all of my work requires getting the shot right in its entirety when the shutter is pressed – you see the finished shot immediately on the camera and know that you've got it (or not!). Working on green screen is so very different and you instead shoot to fill the frame with the subject matter to give yourself the maximum resolution to work with in post.
The other challenge was the movement; skaters move very fast indeed and shooting on primes and wide apertures leaves very little room for focus error. I love primes. You can't beat the clarity, colour, definition and sharpness. To facilitate freezing the action of the skaters I opted to light them with strobes much of the time. That meant I could ignore the shutter speed on the camera as the flash duration would be freezing the motion instead. Nikon SB strobes are ideal for this and can recycle so much faster than their mains counterparts allowing the camera to be on a higher frame rate, something which is a must when the subjects are doing pirouettes in the air which you're trying to capture.
During the two days of the shoot I pretty much employed every photographic technique in the book; from shooting in ambient lighting to just flash and mixing the two also for motion blur. I used moving lighting fixtures (Martin Professional), Source 4s, Par cans, smoke machines, ladders on ice for top shots, to being flat on my belly for the low shots. Every shot was different and it was a thoroughly enjoyable shoot. The collaborative nature of the shoot – working with a graphic designer and producer / director – was a superb benefit too. We bounced ideas off each other and the original sketches of the programmes and poster developed as each hour passed.
To see a selection of the portraits from this commission, visit my archive.
Wild Rose commissioned Robert Hollingworth to shoot the promotional stills for their new production of Cirque de Glace which toured the UK and features the world-renowned Russian Ice Stars
The brief was to shoot the promotional stills for the new brochure of the touring show. The shoot took place on location at a specially constructed ice rink in Bournemouth and for two days we worked our way through the various scenes of the show. The creative idea was that each double-page spread in the brochure would be a composite image. The graphic designer was on location for the shoot which is vital so we could fine-tune ideas and evolve them. Technically it was a complicated shoot; lighting depended on the scene and idea, but I had a lighting rig of Martin fixtures at my disposal as well as strobes (Elinchrom and Nikon SBs on Pocket Wizards). We also shot into a green screen when required to facilitate cutting out and compositing in Photoshop.It was a superb shoot – enormous fun and an incredible challenge. Shooting for two full days for compositing was a new experience. Almost all of my work requires getting the shot right in its entirety when the shutter is pressed – you see the finished shot immediately on the camera and know that you've got it (or not!). Working on green screen is so very different and you instead shoot to fill the frame with the subject matter to give yourself the maximum resolution to work with in post.
The other challenge was the movement; skaters move very fast indeed and shooting on primes and wide apertures leaves very little room for focus error. I love primes. You can't beat the clarity, colour, definition and sharpness. To facilitate freezing the action of the skaters I opted to light them with strobes much of the time. That meant I could ignore the shutter speed on the camera as the flash duration would be freezing the motion instead. Nikon SB strobes are ideal for this and can recycle so much faster than their mains counterparts allowing the camera to be on a higher frame rate, something which is a must when the subjects are doing pirouettes in the air which you're trying to capture.
During the two days of the shoot I pretty much employed every photographic technique in the book; from shooting in ambient lighting to just flash and mixing the two also for motion blur. I used moving lighting fixtures (Martin Professional), Source 4s, Par cans, smoke machines, ladders on ice for top shots, to being flat on my belly for the low shots. Every shot was different and it was a thoroughly enjoyable shoot. The collaborative nature of the shoot – working with a graphic designer and producer / director – was a superb benefit too. We bounced ideas off each other and the original sketches of the programmes and poster developed as each hour passed.
To see a selection of the portraits from this commission, visit my archive.
