Russian Roses

Little over a week ago I met up with Nora Ekman and Katya Nechayeva at Rålambshovsparken for a Sunday morning photoshoot. Nora is a current student at Perm State Ballet School, and Katya graduated last year and now works at the Moscow State Academic Theatre of Classical Ballet. Both are amazing ballet dances with a fantastic repetoire, and Stockholm continued its long streak of wonderful summer weather. It was a really fun photoshoot! Below are some of my favourite photos from the day, and I will link to both Nora and Katya’s Instagram at the end of the post if you want to follow them.

Nora Ekman in the skateboard pit. Her red dress works really well with the concrete background.

Katya Nechayeva. I edited this in black and white to bring out a bit more of the textures. There were also a lot of leaves and dirt in the pit, but nothing worse than what a bit of Photoshop could take away. Most of the edits I did on these ballet photos were to make the background more harmonic and less distracting.

Nora Ekman. It is amazing that she can just casually stand like this.

Nora Ekman. Off balance poses are some of my favourites.

We next moved towards the big white sculpture which has some really interesting geometric lines that we could play with.

Nora Ekman. Here we aimed to get the photo with her left foot just above the ground.

From there we headed to Parkteatern, but rather than using the stage as the location, we opted instead to photograph where the audience normally sits. The reason is that we then had the dancers lit by the sun, while the background was in shadows, making them stand out really well in the photos. Also the white skirt Nora had looked really good when backlit.

A curious little girl stood watching us from afar with her father and baby sibling. So we invited them into the photoshoot, so they would get a photo with Nora and Katya.

Our next location was Smedsuddsbadet, but because it was a really warm day, the beach was packed with people. There is however a little more secluded area just to the side where we instead went to do the next set of photos.