The Journey into dance.
We are Simon and Julie, husband and wife photographers based in London. We specialise in unique painterly style dance images captured over a long exposure.
Where we started……
Our non-conventional and slightly later journey into photography really began when Julie bought Simon a camera some 8 years ago. Having quickly realised she had just lost her husband to a new toy, Julie decided to join in and get her own.
Neither of us had any experience or academic background in photography and took a fair while just to figure out what buttons to push. We dabbled in various genres and spent a lot of time and energy taking pictures of people, animals, trees and anything that passed in front of the lens with as you can guess some very mixed results!
As time progressed, we developed our own style focussing on moody portraiture, and our own slightly edgy dark look some of which you can see in our portfolio. This worked for us for a long while and formed a huge part of our photography journey. What we also learnt that we complemented each other very well with Julie’s creative eye balancing Simon’s technical approach.
One day, by sheer chance, we fell into the world of dance. We wanted to try something different and so mixed things up with the lighting and exposure and a little creative editing. Our dance photography has concentrated on creating painterly, slightly abstract images across a range of dance disciplines and we are loving what we are creating.
We have now held our very first exhibition and are planning several more based on the reception and feedback we have received.
We hope you enjoy our work.
Our Techniques.
We frequently get asked how we achieve the look we do.
Trust us a lot of what we do is trial and error and a huge amount of luck on occasion!
However for the technically minded, the images are taken generally over half a second whilst the dancers are moving and exposed with both continuous and strobe lighting to both freeze and capture the blur of the movement. The painterly quality is produced in the post editing and digital painting phase in Photoshop (which is our own secret recipe)!
What is the creative part is that each dance style (and indeed individual dancers) produces its own challenge in how we approach as photographers. You can see a range of styles in our work from ballet, Latin through to contemporary street.
Everyone of these images are unique, not only from the nature of how we light the dancers but most importantly how we edit the final images. You will never see this work in the high street.