Ballet dancer  

Ballet Dancer Charlotte Cole visits Award winning dance photographer James Thompson’s studio for a dance shoot. Charlotte takes ballet classes at  Jessica Hall’s Elite Dance School in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. 

Our first meeting

Charlotte and I first met at a ballet dance competition  in South Shields. In order to take photographs of the dancers competing in the dance competition I set up a temporary studio.. The dance event took place over two days  As a result  I had the opportunity to meet and photograph many talented dancers. Charlotte was one of those talented ballet dancers whose ability and clean lines immediately caught my eye. 

Amazing clean dance lines

Charlotte’s ability to perform ballet dance moves with such clean lines is really striking. Equally surprising  to see is that each dance photograph  looked perfect and totally effortless. Also, there was no need for lots of practice jumps or preparation.  She does it  perfectly every time. Whatever the dance jump or dance move requested  she was able to do it. Moving on, several weeks later Charlotte arrived at my dance studio! 

Ballet dancer photographs

The first ballet dancer pictures include Charlotte wearing her ballet leotard. Excited to move on to more dramatic lighting and smoke machines Charlotte changes into her ballet pointe shoes and tutu. She looks amazing and is keen to get started. every time the dancer moves, I have to move the studio lights to get the best results. Minutes later the lights are ready and we start to take ballet photographs of Charlotte in her tutu.

 

Tutu’s, pliés and grand jetés!

Almost all ballet photographs show the dancer standing or sitting in various ballet poses. Daring to be different Charlotte is lying on the floor, but because of the unusual angle the photograph is taken from it looks like she is standing up, leaning against a wall! Because of the odd angle of view it’s tempting to look at the dance photograph a little longer than usual to figure out what is actually going on. That is the result we wanted as well as taking a beautiful ballet photograph. You can see from the rest of the ballet photographs the various ballet positions and ballet jumps below. 

 

Ballet photography

Most people agree Ballet and Photography are beautiful art forms.  They give  the photographer and the ballet dancer  the means to  express themselves. When the two are combined some truly amazing results are possible. A a result more and more dancers and photographers are getting together and I believe this is a good thing. Taking photographs of Charlotte is always a pleasure and for such a young dancer she shows great discipline, focus and talent. I hope you go on to achieve all that you want in Dance Charlotte Cole. You have a great talent and you are an absolute pleasure to work with. 

If you’d like to see more of our work then our gallery has more images to offerIf you would like to book or arrange your own dance photo shoot then visit our Contact us page or call James on 07817 512 234.