Midnight Ballet at the Gesù — Montréal

Last week I went back to my roots.
I started re-doing some­thing that I haven’t done in quite a while because it’s dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing. It requires research, scout­ing, patience, a good game plan and did I men­tion patience?

For the first time in a while, I set up a con­cep­tual scene to be pho­tographed where I used  pro­fes­sional per­form­ers.  I’ve always been a huge fan of pho­tographs that tell or sug­gest sto­ries and when I want to make my story super-clear and the story involves peo­ple, once in a while I trade pos­ing for prints or as in this case, I sim­ply hire peo­ple.  I have been doing this on and off for close to two decades with dif­fer­ent sub­ject mat­ter and it gives me a huge thrill every time I do it. It gives you a lot more respon­si­bil­ity though and a lot more to focus on — and I get lost in it. In a good way.

This shoot was dif­fer­ent than pre­vi­ous shoots though because I used inten­tional cam­era move­ment to achieve the painterly effect you see here. I directed the per­form­ers to move in a way that suited this tech­nique at the Gesù Church/Theatre in Mon­treal. Each of these images was shot with a long shut­ter speed and very lit­tle post pro­cess­ing is done on these images. They are mostly cap­tured this way in cam­era. Please feel free to let me know which of these three images you pre­fer and if these types of pho­tographs ‘work’ for you.

Mid­night Bal­let in Mon­treal — Image I

Mid­night Bal­let in Mon­treal — Image II

Mid­night Bal­let in Mon­treal — Image III