Funkstylerz @ Oceana, Plymouth

Got back yesterday from Plymouth where Funkstylerz were performing at Oceana for Orange as part of their Christmas celebrations. They've been performing all around the country at various venues for the mobile phone company.

Physical Productions

Physical Productions are an entertainment act featuring breakdance and street dance. This shoot was for their promotional website, due to be launched very soon.

Funkstylerz @ Donny

Spent the weekend with the Funkstylerz at Doncaster Car Show capturing their performances. They were performing on the Monster stage and had also brought with them, Decibella (who I had previously shot for their website), PeteBox, and some football freestylers.

JP Omari / StreetFunk

Director of Brighton based dance company Streetfunk, JP Omari (who you may remember from the BBC's 'Strictly Dance Fever') hired me for 3 days shooting on the south coast.

It was an intensive 3 days capturing dance class images as well as shots of both him and his staff in various locations.

Mechanikool P

Mechanikool P is the 2006 UK Body Popping Champion, and commissioned me to produce a set of images for his new business venture.

Based in East London, we opted for a location shoot by the river Thames to give the images some geographical context. The shots are lit using a combination of Canon Speedlites and the sun.

Urban Strides : DVD Shoot

Urban Strides have been working on a DVD which is due out in November. I was asked to shoot some stills from the final part of the filming to be used on the cover and for promotional material.

Urban Strides : Shake The Room

Urban Strides were performing in Basingstoke in Shake The Room, a platform for youth entertainers. The venue was a small intimate theatre which gave a very different feel to the previous arena tour venues.

The greatest challenge I faced this time around was my positioning. During the technical rehearsal I had free reign to run about in front of the stage. However, because the stage was fairly low, I couldn't do this during the actual performance as I would have created an obstruction for the audience. This meant I had to shoot from the wings at the side of the stage. Initially I thought this may have given me real problems with the theatre using large amounts of smoke, but I managed to get a few good shots.

Urban Strides @ Move It 08

Just spent the weekend at Olympia in London with Urban Strides for the 2008 Move It Exhibition. Had an awesome time and got some good shots! Here's a few...

Urban Strides Arena Tour 2007

One of the areas of photography I specialise in shooting is dance, and just before Christmas, I was very privileged to be able to go on tour with a client of mine, Urban Strides.

Urban Strides are a youth Hip Hop dance troupe and were performing as part of the "Young Voices Concerts" at arenas all over the country in front of crowds up to 20000 people!

Shooting the performances threw up a few photographic challenges. It was a low light situation that demanded fast shutter speeds in order to capture the movement. Flash wasn't possible because there was smoke on the stage which would have reflected the light back similar to driving in fog at night. I ended up shooting at iso1600 using my 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. This enabled me to shoot in shutter priority at 1/200sec, which was just fast enough to freeze people enough, but still have a tiny amount of blur around hands to indicate movement.



 
 

If  you would like to see the performance in full, check out the video below. If you look closely you can see me taking some of the shots above!



A personal highlight from the trip was during one of the finales. The show finale consisted of all the performers from the night wearing santas hats and dancing like idiots to the sound of Christmas songs. Well at the Manchester Evening News Arena I had a santas hat put on me and was told to take photos from the stage amongst everyone else. So there I am, dancing like an idiot like everyone else whilst taking photos, on stage in front of 20000 people! Not something I imagine many people get to do!

Decibella

On monday I had the pleasure of spending a busy 6 hours shooting a new all girl dance group for their new website. We had a lot to get done with several outfit changes, group and solo shots as well as hair and make-up to be done for the different looks.

My setup was fairly easy. I had a white backdrop with a long thin softbox lighting it at f/16. I used a large rectangular softbox on camera right at f/8 to light the subjects with a hairlight to the right of the backdrop. It was all triggered using my Pocket Wizards, which I'm still amazed at how flawlessly they seem to be working!

This all gave me f/8 at 1/125sec at iso200. I shot 95% of the day at 50mm, although there were a couple of shots where I opted for a wide angle lens to give a bit of distortion.