Though I’ve been exploring long exposures and shutter drag in my portrait photography for years now, I’ve recently began to explore it in a new way. For some time now I’ve implemented intentional movement into my shoots but I was always doing the moving— not my subject. I’d shoot at exposures longer than 1/30th of a second and I’d move my camera around as my subject sat there. I’d mix in a strobe light with a continuous light source so that at least part of the subject was sharp while the rest of the frame fell away to blurred movement. Lately, however, I’ve decided to ditch the strobe and fully embrace the blur.
A couple months back I experimented with making long exposures and lighting my subject with a pulsing, multi-colored LED. My camera was on a tripod and I had my subject move around during the five-second exposures. I noted how much variance there was from shot to shot as the subject changed the pace of their movements. For example, if the subject stood in place and only moved their arms during an exposure, their body would burn in to pure white while their moving arms picked up each of the different colors. I absolutely loved this result and wanted to introduce more chaos into the colors and shapes being produced, so I began projecting video onto my subjects instead.
In the above gallery you can see just how much variance there is from shot to shot depending on what colors and shapes were being projected onto the subject and how the subject was moving throughout the exposure. Because it was so chaotic and varied I couldn’t over-direct the subject since I didn’t know what to expect. It was all I could do to set up the parameters, surrender to the chaos, and watch as the beauty unfolded.