Inspiration: Ed Flores - Dance Photography

Ed Flores is a dance photographer who once had a medical scare and then became a photographer, completely out of the blue.  He had to learn from scratch, and read everything he could find about the field, but then ended up just teaching himself.  He says that he looked back at paintings by artist Carravaggio.

"Carravaggio was an artist who used Chiaroscuro; shadow and light to add depth, emotion and drama to his paintings, I was completely mesmerised and I realised how much I love light and shadow". Ed Flores. 

 He then learnt to use light and shadows as a tool in his photography.  He says that at first he wasn't very confident in the field and would "flick through magazines and wished with all my heart that I could produce work like that", which is very similar to how I personally feel sometimes.  He worked with dance first in 1996, for Jory Hancock, Head of the University of Arizona Dance Departments and had a job creating a body of Dance photographs for a magazine.  He says seeing his work on magazine covers made him more confident.

"Nothing I capture can ever do justice to the line, grace, beauty and passion of the dancer." "Dance is my passion. It moves me, it drives me and it humbles me". Ed Flores.

 I personally agree with his love of light and shadow, it's definitely why I have such a love and interest into nude photography and the 'body'.  Light and shadow can be used to make the body look beautiful in many different ways.

I have included Ed Flores Dance Photography as inspiration, because I think that his images are beautiful, and as he says, the justice of the dancer is what shows the beauty and grace of the images.  Props including, dust, material, reflections and ribbons are jus some that can make dance photography really creative.   The reason also for including him and his images within research is for getting the idea of dance positions that look great on camera.  I will hopefully be looking into using a dancer to work with body movements within the contemporary and ballet dance, to get motion images so knowing what looks good is great to help for my shoots. Here are just some of his dance photography images below:

 He mentioned before, lighting is a great thing when in comes down to the body.  Working with body shapes using just lighting can be challenging but so creative and effective.  As proven in his images, he has worked with a lot of different lighting techniques.  I like how some have different colours and tones in the images whereas some are just on a plain white background to make the dancer stand out.  There is a wide variety of what can be done with dance moves, so capturing them at the right moment takes skill and time.

Here below are images similar to ones that I used in one of my first few blog posts and I used them next to images of mine where I used the material throwing technique shown in these four images.  I think it looks fantastic.  I had a small piece of material because my studio is quite small, you can tell that these studios would have a huge amount of space for the dancers to create such big movements.  I included these at the beginning of my assignment because I wanted to originally look at dance portraits and maybe connect a theme.  Now I will just be looking at the movements and concentrating on exaggerating the movements.

Because I now want to exaggerate the dance movements themselves, my images will not be static dance portraits like these images here. I will be concentrating on a different effect with slow motion, motions and movements.  Although these type of images by Ed Flores are beautiful, it will have to be something I try on a later date with a bigger studio space but they still will be a great inspiration to me and my work.
At least looking at dance portraits has made me realise that I could be more creative with the point I am trying to make for my project.