Long Exposures Idea !!

I've looked at dance photography, and have known my subject was going to be about body motion and movements for quite a while now, but, originally I was looking into dance portraits moved on from my on location nude's.  I briefly looked at dance portraits on locations, like Ella Ruth's dance portraits, but I figured this would be quite difficult at this moment in time because of the bad weather.  

Once I had moved on from dance portraits on location and figured that wouldn't work, I focused on dance and creative movements with motion.  I looked into the history of motion photography and thought that this could be really creative.  So one perfect way of showing great motion is: Long Exposure's!!

Long exposures can be used with any genre of photography as most photographers know, common examples are of star trails, moving cars at night, or long exposures of flowing rivers or seas that creates a soft misty effect.  Long exposures can create beautiful imagery using lights and natural light.  And quite obviously, you can change the shutter speed to whatever you like to test different effects.  But for my project I am looking at 'the dancer' therefore I was wondering what research I could find  for long exposures and dance connected. 

Dancing can be fast paced or slow paced but is movements of the body in motion, so this is a perfect for showing long exposures because dancer move in all kinds of positions and ways.  I typed into Google, dancers in blurred motion, as seen below, and it came up with some quite interesting images.  One's that I really liked the look of.  I have seen many examples and ideas that I will share.  The dance idea stays but I need to look into long exposures with people. 

My Final Project Idea 

As you can see from some of the images above, motions of the body can be slowed down and exaggerated by long exposures.  The movements are captured for however long the exposure is for, in a blur until the shutter release.  This creates a smooth, blurry vision so you can almost see exactly what the dancer has done.  This is the effect I am going to be working on and what I am planning to do as my final ideas.  I have refined my research base and will show in the next few blog posts. I plan to have one dancer and get the to perform some dance moves and capture them with a long exposure and see the results.