Urban Ballet with Kayleigh Lush
Having finally managed to process some of the urban ballet images from my recent shoot with the dancer Kayleigh Lush .
I thought it was worth sharing a few of them in my blog.
The idea of the project was to shoot a set of ballet themed images in a urban setting.
First of all I needed a good location, which also needed to be fairly local to me.
That choice of location was Saltaire, which is near Shipley and very local to me.
Because I have been there a number of times I knew that it had some really good locations which we could to shoot ballet against.
Another requirement was a trained ballet dancer, so I contacted Kayleigh Lush.
Now having worked with Kayleigh before , I knew she was capable of producing good ballet poses. Which is what I wanted for this project.
Kayleigh is a trained dancer and works really hard to produce great images, especially dance. So was the ideal choice for this project.
As I mentioned above the choice of location was Saltaire, near Shipley which is a world heritage site and has some interesting buildings to work against.
These include the famous Salts Mill with the Leeds Liverpool Canal running between its buildings.
As well as the impressive United Reformed Church. which is just across the canal for the mill builds.
All these building were built by Sir Titus Salt around the 1850s, and I was sure would give good and different building to shoot dance poses against.
On the day the weather was overcast and grey which was good, but to lift Kayleigh out of the background I needed some extra light.
To provided this extra punch of light, I therefore set up a single off camera flash unit fitted with a 19″ McGillicuddy beauty dish . This is my favourite modifier to use with a single off camera flash set up.
Urban ballet Images
Urban Ballet 2 
Urban Ballet 6
As the day progressed the weather turned to light rain, which made working on pointe and landing jumps tricky for Kayleigh.
This therefore required us to make a change to the location, fortunately there was some local woods near by.
Which would provided some shelter from the rain for a while, but still allow us to shoot the projects theme of dance.
