Bill Wadman : "Motion"

I knew as soon as I saw these images by Bill Wadman that they were exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.  This series called 'Motion' is all about motion and body movements.  When I first came up with the idea of shooting long exposures and body movements, in my head I was thinking about slow moving body parts of a dancer and this is exactly what they are.  Another reason they are what I was looking for was the fact it was shot in a studio and on a black backdrop, which was the way I was going to shoot my finals.

I can imagine that Shinichi Maruyama's 'Nude' series would look something like these if they were not all combined or if there was much fewer images than 10,000.  The motion's look great in both series'.

Photographer Bill Wadman has captured 9 dancers in flowing motion with long exposure photography.  The images were captured in a dark room with a single soft light source shining down on the dancers from above.  Wadman shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and a 35mm f/1.4 lens using a 3 second exposure with his lens stopped down to f/11.

The series titled "Motion" is available as a book and his prints have been featured worldwide in The New York Times, La Monde, Der Spiegel, Times of London, USA Today, and Corriere della Sera, to name just a few.

I found an article on a website called 'PetaPixel', which had a short statement by Bill Wadman of himself describing how the project came about and started.  I am going to show what he said as it could be similar to my own ways I came to my ideas.

"'Motion' started as an experiment, a departure from my traditional and conceptual portrait work.  I had attended a lecture by old-school sports photographer Marvin Newman where he showed a slow shutter speed image he had taken of a boxer with his saturated glove smearing across the frame as he punched his opponent.  I was inspired by the imagery and the ideas of capturing motion in a dynamic way, so started experimenting with long exposure photography." 

" My initial plan was to use a broad cross-section of subjects, specifically people who move as part of their job.  Athletes, construction workers, cooks, etc, were all on my initial list of potential shoots.  However, my first experimentation was with a professional dancer and the results were incredible, so I decided all the subjects should be people whose use of motion is their living.  During the following months I has sessions with nine different dancers."

The reasons I find what he says interesting is because my ideas came about in a completely different way to his.  As soon as I knew I wanted to work with motions and long exposure photography I knew that dance was the best option.  Its the best way to show so many different variations and movements to create amazing results.  He has used nine different dancers for each image where as I plan to only use one dancer but to still show different movements.

I love how the movements work in this series, better than any I had seen before.  I think one reason is that because it is shot on a black backdrop obviously in a studio, it make it seem more concentrated on the movements whereas on a previous blog post I showed long exposure images of dancers on stage, which makes so much space around so you start to think about the whole show rather than the movements at the time.

I like how you can see where each dancer has been at each stage and how you can see where they have moved to.  I think capturing the exposure at the right time is important, but will be something I can try out when I come to try my ideas.

Because I have now found out that each of these images were taken with a 3 second exposure time, I think it gives me a starting point for my first initial tests.  I will then be able to see how the images will look.  I also know the light source needed and created in this series.  I knew it would only be one single light as if there were more there would be too much light into the camera.  I cant wait to get started and capture some interesting moves.  A series like this looks great when all the images are next to each other so that you can see just how different a slight movements can make to the whole idea.  I am so happy I was able to find these, and will work from them and hopefully come up with some new ideas and create some strange dance long exposures.

The few images that show red outfits really stand out compared to the other images.  Like this image above left for example,  it really has a lot of colour to the others and a great pose that keeps her legs more in focus than her arms as she waves them around to create wiggly lines movements.  It's quite funny to hear about what the dancers had to say about the project.  One of the dancers was asked for this series, her name is Amber Bogdewiecz and she says:

"This past month I was fortunate enough to be in some fantastic photos for photographer Bill Wadman's 'Motion' project.  It was really difficult to move at the exact right speed to capture the ribbons of movement, but after a few hours, I finally figured it out." She says how, "If you has been sitting in on the shoot session, I would have looked like a crazy, dancing monkey trying to cross 6 feet of space fluidly in about 6 seconds".  

It sounds like a subject like this could be really fun and interesting.  Depending on the dancer, and what I can think of the results could have so much motion going on, I could try to create all kinds of shapes with the body in a long exposure.

Overall, I think this project looks fantastic and the shapes, ribbons of lights, body movements and motions look perfect for a series titled 'Motion' as it is exactly what you see.  I would like to use a black studio backdrop which I have at home and would like to get creative with the dancer I have chosen to come up with new different ideas.  My ideas are along the same lines with this project though, so I will have to see how my test shoots go.