flour

One of the many types of people photography that I love to do is anything involving dance. I love the motion, the grace, and the positions dancers are capable of. I try whenever I can to do something a little different with dancers. Something where they are out of their normal dance studio surroundings. There are so many different things you can do. One thing that can be a lot of fun and really make your dance images stand out is to photograph dancers along with some form of flying powder. Dance is so dynamic and adding flour, talcum powder, powdered paints, water and things like that can really add to an image and make it really vibrant.

I’ve done these sort of dance images a number of times and have used various powders. My favorite is plain old flour because you can buy so much of it so cheaply. Talcum powder just seems too fine and is more expensive. Tempera paints are a lot of fun and add a lot of color to your images. Just be aware that these powdered paints can get all over and into everything and can be hard to remove. Some of my lights are still covered with yellow from years ago! For any images using powders you will want a lot of room and be in a space that you are not afraid of getting covered with the powder. Clean up can be a nightmare! Outside in the dark would be a good option if it’s not windy if you can find a place.

These sorts of images are not very difficult to do (except for the cleanup!) I will describe what I have found to work for me and talk about one of my more recent powder images, Dark Angel. This is a concept I had tried years before but was unable to get the wings to shape properly and was more fortunate a couple weeks ago when I tried again.

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