I had met Zoja during the shoot with Jusztina of Delighters Theatre, which is the topic of an older blog post. Zoja trains and teaches at Room to Move, Edinburgh, so we decided to shoot there. We did a couple of photoshoots, separated by about a week.
The location is quite challenging to shoot in, because of all of the “clutter”. Parkour equipment, mats, hoops, bicycles, etc… make it difficult to get a “clean” background in the photos. The solution is to underexpose the said background so much that it effectively becomes black.
A couple of set ups involved aerial straps. For the first one, I used two rims lights (speed lights placed left and right slightly behind Zoja) to show the straps and the third speedlight in front to light her face. I couldn’t use a light modifier as it would spread the light enough to reveal the cluttered background.
Given the partly translucent nature of Zoja’s outfit, I thought I’d try to change the lighting set up, putting the third speedlight behind her. I like it better.
The second strap set up involved Zoja spinning. I used simple cross lighting. One light in front to camera right and the second one behind to camera left. You can tell by the shadows on the ground.
Zoja had brought a number of costumes for light painting. In order to add some interest to the photographs, we used some of the parkour equipment.
by 
