Originally Posted by
Chataignier
@Manfred : The flash was a studio strobe with a large grided softbox, the low light on her legs and feet was an aesthetic choice. The problem was the continuous light. I had two 90W fluorescent lights with softboxes (around 4500 Lumens) to play with and chose to put one on the extreme right at the starting point for the dancer facing left, and the other next to the camera to boost the light in the middle. BIG mistake, the one near the camera lit the curtains (and the floor) far too much resulting in the folds in the curtains showing up as vertical lines. I had thought that square law fall off would be enough to leave the curtains black, it was not.
Apart from that I'm quite satisfied and the dancer is delighted with the shots. Next time I'll use just one continuous light on the right and boost the light in the middle in PP if necessary. Another refinement might be to move the camera more to the left, angled along the path of the dancer. DOF would not be a problem as I had masses of light and could stop down to f11 or more if needed and, anyway, the RH side is all motion blur, nothing needs to be sharp.