Ballet Art . . .
By
John Terence Turner
Stock Asylum Columnist
Nov. 5, 2007
©
2007 John Terence Turner
I got into ballet photography circuitously. I had never photographed
dance and rarely attended ballet performances.
To my surprise, the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) called and asked if I’d be interested in doing some of their photography.
They were calling, they said, because a major New York ballet company had hired a hockey photographer, assuming he could produce better action pictures than their dance photographers.
They knew that I did a lot of action photography. Based on that reasoning, they wondered if I would be interested in shooting for PNB.
I said "yes."
 This poster was the result of solving several photographic and design problems. In the end, the photo also became a best-selling stock image. ( © John Terence Turner ). |
The idea was not well thought out. They didn’t want me to shoot performances so we set up a number of studio shoots. Gradually, the shoots evolved away from action shots (which were hard to coordinate and time-consuming), toward the kind of pictures any studio shooter could handle.
I was not a studio shooter and did not aspire to be one. I did not get excited by the kind of pictures they wanted.
PNB and I drifted apart, but we stayed in touch and I kept thinking about the kinds of pictures of ballet that were interesting to me.
One day I ran into an acquaintance from the PNB Board of Directors.
The conversation moved to photography. “It’s too bad you’re not shooting for us now,” she said, “I’d like to see you involved.”
At that point, I described the idea that had been germinating in my head. "How about a poster of three dancers doing a grand jete?’" I asked.
A grand jete’ is “a jump in which a dancer springs from one foot to land on the other with one leg forward of their body and the other stretched backward while in the air.”
I wanted to photograph the grand jete’ because, to me, it was the most photographically dramatic movement in ballet.
“I’ve looked in the dance sections in all the poster stores,” I said, “there are very few grand jete’ shots and those were shot in performance, so they are grainy black and white.”
Then I made my main point: “And there are none with three dancers in the air”
My limited appreciation for dance was based on its athleticism. Accordingly, I approached this poster idea from my own personal bias — sports.
While the subject would be ballet, I wanted it to be like a sports poster. I wanted to see the dancers’ bodies. I wanted to see the muscles, sinews and tendons. I wanted to see sweat.
My idea was to make a poster that would be an appreciation of the dancers as athletes.
“I want to do it in a photography studio,” I added, “where I can control the light and repeat the action over and over.”
The reason for the repetitions is that if you analyze a grand jete’ with more than one dancer, there is rarely perfect synchronization.
From the audience we see the whole movement, not whether the dancers are perfectly coordinated. If you were to freeze such a moment (as I was proposing to do for the poster) you would see many details that fall short of perfection.
Achieving a well-synchronized leap with three dancers becomes an astoundingly difficult task — as I would learn.
If the dancers were dressed for a particular ballet, the costumes would limit the appeal of the picture. Therefore, the dancers would be dressed as if they were working out—not rehearsing a specific ballet. By the same reasoning, we ruled out performance make-up.
The ballet board of directors was interested.
My proposal was to shoot it for free as long as they paid all the expenses up front. I would receive 25 percent of poster sales revenue after the printing and other expenses like studio rental, styling, film and processing were paid for.
The plan I presented was that the printing of the poster could be paid for by having a limited number of posters signed by the dancers and me. The printing bill was estimated to be $5,000.00.
The dancers and I would sign 100 numbered prints and they would be sold for $50 each in the lobby of the Opera House at a performance. After that, the unsigned posters would be sold for $25 each.
The Board agreed to the plan.
I rented a large downtown studio owned by the well-known Dumas brothers. They weren’t photographers, but worked as producers, assistants and location finders and their rental studio was big, well equipped and busy. We had a long association on a number of projects, so a deal was easily struck.
One of the technical challenges for this shoot was to truly stop the action. This meant stopping all motion –– not just of the torsos of the dancers, but also the extremities that would be moving even faster.
Not only did I require a lot of strobe light, I needed to reduce strobe duration to as short a time as possible to prevent the “strobe shadow” we didn’t want to see.
(Strobe shadow occurs when the duration of the strobe and/or the shutter speed isn’t fast enough to freeze the movement in the photograph. The faster the strobe duration and the faster the shutter-speed, the less likelihood of strobe shadows.)
To achieve the fastest possible strobe duration, we needed lots of strobe heads. At full power, every time the number of heads is doubled, the strobe duration is halved because the electical power surge that creates the flash is split between more heads.
For this project, with diffused light from the front and hard light on the background, we used 12 heads to project 6000 watt-seconds of light. This arrangement resulted in a strobe duration of 1/1000th of a second.
I did a test shoot on a pair of student dancers and verified that we had the set-up that would work for the poster.
For the shoot, PNB provided five dancers, so we could rotate people in and out. We worked for about six hours. It went pretty smoothly.
One issue for the dancers was that they had to do the grand jete’ in front of the Hasselblad equipped with an 80mm (normal) lens. I had an area painted and lit and I pre-focused on the area where the dancers would jump. Therefore, they could not work their way around the room, leaping and landing and leaping again.
This made it hard on the dancers because they always had to take off on the same foot and land on the same foot. They had to do it in unison and as perfectly as possible. The idea was to show razor-sharp detail so they could display their splendidly conditioned bodies. Any mistakes would be mercilessly visible.
Film from the first hour of shooting was rushed to a lab, processed and returned so we were able to examine it and plan the last hour of shooting.
A mistake could occur in any of four areas, namely any one of the three dancers or the photographer. They had to leap in unison; I had to shoot at the apogee of the jump. If any one of us was off, it was a blown shot — there were many such examples, which is typical when shooting action.
I had everyone behind me (the dance master, the resting dancers and the studio managers) tell me whether I was hitting my exposure at the height of the jump or if was I early, or late.
It helped, because I had to have my finger descending on the shutter before the dancers reached the magic moment or I would be too late.
The banks of strobes had to produce their thousandth of a second of light at exactly the right time, or the work of a lot of people would be for naught. All of this happened in less than a second. Then the strobes recycled and we did it again.
For all the repetitions, there were numerous conspicuous mistakes. For example, when one dancer was slightly out of synch with the others, the evidence was glaringly obvious.
One of the best shots, for example, was flawed because the hand of one dancer obscured the face of the dancer behind her. Otherwise, the shot was great.
Perfect focus, fast shutter speed and short strobe duration meant that mistakes could not be hidden behind blur. The percentage of good shots was surprisingly small. Despite the low percentages, we had a successful shoot.
Then the first problem arose. The designers to whom I had given the project and who had supervised the styling, presented their mock-up of the poster using our choice of the best photograph.
I didn’t like it. The design tried too hard to be different and it veered drastically from what we had discussed earlier.
There was no time for a re-design; the board meeting to approve the project was the next day. Some of the board members traveled from out of town.
I wasn’t surprised when I was told that they had voted to kill the project. They didn’t like the design. There was one ray of hope. They did like the picture.
I was dismayed and disheartened. I thought about it for a while and called another design firm with which I had a long relationship. The reason I hadn’t offered them the project in the first place was that I thought they were too busy and since it was “expenses only,” they wouldn’t be interested.
The call I made was to Hornall Anderson Design Works in Seattle. John Hornall turned it over to his partner Jack Anderson.
Jack was incredibly generous with his time and talent. Perceptively, he realized that the board required educating about the choices of design that would lead to one that they would like — we hoped
I managed to persuade the board to convene for a re-presentation the next week.
Jack spent the intervening weekend doing sketches of designs using the photograph, but that were not designed to become the poster. These were intended to show the board members design options that would progressively lead them to the final design.
In a clever bit of showmanship, Jack would not allow the final design to be seen until the end of the presentation.
“You,” said Jack to me, “will do the presentation. I’ll prep you on what to say on each of the sketches.”
There were 14 sketches and one mounted version of the final poster design that was covered in black velour and which rested on an easel at the end of the boardroom.
I presented each of Jack’s sketches of the poster picture, done in different styles. Jack had told me what to say about each of them and why we weren’t going with each particular design.
Finally, I unveiled the full-color mock-up of the real poster. Jack had laboriously cut with an exacto-knife the little strips of metallic paper that run top to bottom and glued them to the lighter metallic blue that was the background for the dancers.
Those slim, vertical stripes get progressively closer from left to right. Additionally, the band of color above the photograph gets hotter from left to right. These subtle design elements lead the viewers' eyes in the direction the dancers are jumping."
He also had cut the background away from one side of the photograph and allowed one dancer’s leg and arm to extend onto the metallic background. He then created a subtle drop-shadow for the hand and leg, which ironically, slightly resembles the strobe shadow that I labored to prevent.
It looked fantastic.
When I removed the black velour cover from the poster, the reaction in the room was an immediate, admiring, “Ohhhhh,” followed by a chorus of “Yes, yes!” that came from the chairs that lined the long conference table at the law firm where the meeting was held.
Jack was on a roll. He used his influence to get a terrific deal from a printer (Atomic). The ten-color (!) printing job was done on very heavy paper using a “split fountain” (the band of hot color at the top of the photograph, which intentionally varied slightly from poster to poster), metallic inks for the background and striping.
The plan to immediately pay off the printing bill with signed copies of the poster worked well. It was aided by the local NBC-TV affiliate when they covered the signing at a local art gallery.
A part of my agreement with PNB was that the dancers all signed model releases. The image became a best seller as a stock photograph.
The poster was also a critical success. It earned an Addy. The New York Art Directors Society awarded it a Silver Medal and it became a page in their calendar.
A generous and talented designer saved a project that was in danger of foundering; a ballet company got good publicity and made a few dollars. And I got to photograph great athletes in an environment that had no horses, rocks, sprockets or snow.
(John Terence Turner has been shooting stock photography for 20 years. His work can be seen at Getty Images, Alamy and, of course, The Stock Asylum, where his column appears twice a month. He lives and works in Seattle, WA.)
Turner's web site can be found at: http://www.johnterenceturner.com.
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