Laetitia on the daybed (Patreon)

As you probably know I love to work with dancers, yogis etc. One maini reason is they have extraordinary body awareness and flexibility which allow them to make radical poses. And this frequently makes it possible to create extrodinary images.

I had this idea about photographing Laetitia on a Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona Daybed which I've always admired for it's design (its normally situated in my living room). Even though it's very strict in shape, there is also a wonderful organic components that I thought would work well with some ballet poses.

The challenge was that I needed a light directly from above and to the rear of the model to create the reflections in the leather and highlights on Laetitia's back, while at the same time letting the light taper off so I also could get good contrast on the sides of the body.

I used two beauty dish lamps, both with a grid and placed next to the camera. Then I set up a white background well behind the model and shot the two gridded lights up to the ceiling and also hitting the background a bit thus creating a fairly long and big light.

The larger silver umbrella you see in the video is not used for this shot (I just didn't remove it).

Sidenote, for something like this where I'm shooting a object like the daybed straight on I would normally always use a tripod. It makes it easier to align camera and side of bed so it becomes perfectly symmetrical.

In this case I did not have access to a tripod high enough so I had to do it handheld, and fix the inaccuracy afterwards.

See the Behind the scenes video here