Ballet Idaho Company Artists: Kaelyn Lefferts and Kylie Corrigan

This past summer I reached out to Jessica, a ballet dancer who I photographed a few years ago. I wanted to see if she could help me meet some new ballet artists who would be open to meet and collaborate for a photo shoot. I wanted to boost my portfolio a bit more and keep learning how to create portrait work with dancers. Luckily Kaelyn and Kylie, who are company artists at Ballet Idaho, had some spare time and graciously gave me a few hours to create some portraits with my film and digital cameras.

I mainly used natural lighting that was available in the studio. I don’t really find it fun to bring strobes or lighting. I brought a Neewer CB60 RGB LED light just in case. I’m glad I did because it worked for a few shots where I needed a bit more illumination since the windows were too far away. We also had a few clouds blocking the sun.

The square 6x6 photos are the film shots taken with my Bronica SQ-Ai. With that camera I shot two different black and white film stocks that I had on hand. The first one was good ol’ Kodak Tri-X 400, and I pushed that 1 stop at 800. Additionally I shot Foma Pan 400 pushed +1. Honestly, I’ll probably never use it again. It got slightly muddy compared to Tri-X and other B&W’s I’ve used before.

I hope to work with both of these dancers again. I want to continue creating portraits with ballet dancers. Who knows, this may actually be forming into some type of personal project that I can work on and create with more and more dancers.