Delighters Theatre Circus Arts Photoshoot

In my quest to do personal projects with circus artists I contacted Jusztina Hermann, the founder of Delighters Circus Theatre company. She was enthusiastic about doing a project together and organised for us to shoot at North Edinburgh Arts Theatre.

Since my first experience with dancers, I had wanted for quite some time to explore a bit more the combination of long exposure with flash. Jusztina told me they had costumes with LEDs on them, and I thought that would be ideal. Jusztina also brought to the shoot her circus artist friend Zoja, and that opened a whole new range of possibilities.

At the beginning of the shoot, I sensed a little bit of skepticism on the part of Jusztina about the long exposures experiment. I reassured her saying we would take some “regular” photos as well. However, when she and Zoja saw on the back of my camera the kinds of pictures I was getting, they were totally convinced and provided several great ideas for a number of set ups. This is a wonderful advantage of the digital era. Not only can you immediately see the results of your experiments, allowing you to adjust accordingly to get the result you want. As a photographer you are able to gain the trust of your subjects. Without that trust, the pictures are not likely to be good.

The first set up was the unicorn costume.

Jusztina of Delighters Theatre in a unicorn costume — Since in the west we read from left to right, this is the direction I had Jusztina moving.

After a number of “solo” pictures with a flash in a soft box going off at the beginning of the exposure, we experimented with a “double” unicorn. In this set up, one flash fired at the beginning of the exposure, triggered from the camera, and a second flash was triggered manually by Zoja at the end of a four second exposure.

While Jusztina was changing outfits, I started taking some long exposure pictures of Zoja and her red umbrella. It became quickly apparent that the set up wasn’t working. I then saw Zoja walk in front of the LED continuous light and the backlighting of the red umbrella looked spectacular. I therefore decided to take some “normal” flash photos with two speedlights to the left and right slightly behind Zoja. Sometimes you just have to go with what the subject gives you, regardless of any previous idea you may have had.

Circus artist Zoja Dravai and her red umbrella — I had Zoja rotate the umbrella while I took a sequence of pictures.

When Jusztina came back in her gold costume, we reverted to long exposures, as it was clearly working.

Jusztina of Delighters Theatre with hoops in a gold costume — Initially, I wasn’t sure how a costume without LEDs would look like, but the reflective nature of this gold costume makes it work.

The final outfit was also decorated with LEDs, but Jusztina had two of them. We first started with some solo long exposures with Zoja.

Circus artist Zoja Dravai in a bright yellow and red costume — Moving all the way out of the frame.

Then some double Zoja pictures like with the unicorn set up. This time it was up to Jusztina to manually trigger the second flash at the end of the exposure.

Double circus artist Zoja picture during a long exposure — In case you were wondering, this was a six elephants exposure.

At last, with both flashes triggered from the camera at the beginning of a long exposure, I shot a series with the two of them.

Circus artists Jusztina Hermann and Zoja Dravai in yellow costumes. — I waited until the end for the set up with the two of them, as it is harder to get right. I wanted for all of us to first gain experience with one subject.

There was one last set up I needed to experiment with, zooming during a long exposure. After that, it was clearly time to wrap up as we had gone on quite a bit longer than originally planned.