15 Dec Daniel & Desirée, Capturing Bachata Fusion

I had the great opportunity to work with two-time bachata world champion dancers Daniel and Desirée. My good friend Kat from Ferocity Dance Company had brought them all the way from Spain to teach classes and perform at her Bachata Masters event and I figure it would be a great opportunity to work with such an amazing couple. I’m very grateful for the joint collaboration. This is my journal of the production of the shoot and how it all went down with regards to the production.

First off I just have to say…when I chat with newbie photographers they always ask me what camera I shoot with. Of course to me I already know that the camera doesn’t take great photos but the the person behind the camera takes great photos. So I oblige and let them know that I still shoot on the Canon 5D MKII which is a camera that is nearly 5 years old. It’s nothing super fancy compared to the latest cameras on the market today but it gets the job done. With that said I’m pleased to say both photos and video from this shoot were shot on my dinosaur camera the Canon 5D MKII:)

So for the lighting, essentially I used the same lighting for both the photos and video that I captured. This is mainly because we only had the studio for two hours so I didn’t want to worry about going crazy with rearranging lights especially since it was just me…without any assistants since the planning of the shoot was sort of short notice. The lights I used were low powered Alien Bees which are very versatile lights since they have a strobe and a modeling light built in. This allowed me to use the strobe light to capture photos and the modeling light to capture video. And the modeling light traditionally isn’t used for video lighting but in my case it worked out perfectly for what I needed.

The actual lighting setup involved 5 lights. I used one key light slightly off camera left, a fill light off to the right, a hair light in the rear up high and two lights on the background. This setup allowed me to light Daniel and Desirée with descent lighting along with adding depth to the them by applying layers of lighting where needed. Overall I was very pleased with the footage that we captured. Not only did Daniel and Desirée look amazing(which of course was no surprise) but I was very pleased with my lighting overall.

Let me first say that for the video the post-production was a verrry time consuming process but the final product made it so worth it. The software that I used was Davenci Resolve, for coloring, After Effects for titling effects and Premiere for editing. I also used Photoshop as well for parts of the titling process.

This is the second project in which I used Davinci to color grade on and must admit I’m really impressed with the tools within it and all the options available. When I first dove into Davinci I I was a bit intimidated because everything looked so different than what I was used to but after watching a few tutorials on YouTube and Vimeo I quickly got the hang of it.

Starring Two-Time Bachata World Champions Daniel y Desirée.

Produced by Ferocity Dance Company

An Urban Avenue film