Igår, idag, imorgon

What is life but a sequence of movements, ever present, never completely still. “Yesterday, today, tomorrow.” In this photoshoot with dancer Emilia Fridholm we continued exploring how to capture movement in photography. Emilia moves, the camera moves, but the picture taken is a static representation of what happened. By increasing the exposure time, the camera’s sensor is able to see more of the movement, blending the moments together into a single frame.

One interesting thing that emerged is that not everything moves all the time. Sometimes there can be a still hand or foot, which then remains sharp in the picture. Other times there is only an arm that moves. For the really long exposure times Emilia could vary her movement speed, and part of her trajectory would show up as more pronounced. It was important to strike a balance between the movement speed and the exposure time. We wanted a bit of movement, as too much movement in the frame would make it unclear and hard to make out.

Another way to capture movement is to use objects whose trajectories in space change their shape. Long hair is great, but other things like cloth or feathers also leave traces of the movement that just transpired.