How to Capture Dance Movement | Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

Long exposure photography allows a picture to build up over time. That’s exactly what you want when your subject is moving and you need to show all that movement in a single still photo. This is a surprisingly simple technique that’s perfect for sports portraits or in this case dance photography.

In his small home studio (just 15 feet wide) photographer, Gavin Hoey starts by hanging up a makeshift black background. For lighting, he uses a continuous LED to capture the dancers’ moves during a long exposure. A Flashpoint Xplor400 is then added to freeze the dancer with a burst of flash. The key to making all this work is using a camera setting called slow sync flash, which is also known as 2nd curtain sync flash. Different name, same results.

Luckily Gavin takes you through all of the information you need to recreate this shot at home. By the end of the video, you’ll understand how and why combining two very different light types creates such amazing and beautiful dance photos.

Interested in learning more about capturing motion during your photography shoots? Take a look at these guides on 42 West:

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