Bill Wadman Photography

1. Bill Wadman Photography
Josh Sampson
“Sometimes we forget that photography doesn't have to capture a single decisive
moment, but a glimpse outside our usual sensory boundaries that reveals something
both familiar and alien”

2. Bill Wadman’s Work
Bill Wadman is a New York city based photographer who was inspired by motion
blurring a picture of professional dancers to try something new with his friends. By no
time at all, he was working with eight dancers over a few months who loved the idea
of creating images that would speak to the grace and fluidity of their movements.
This was because traditional posed photographs in their dance programmes tended
to look rather static.
When taking the photographs, he used an exposure of 3.2 seconds at an f-stop of 10
along with an ISO of 200. Wadman would communicate effectively with the dancers
by showing them, the image after every shot so that they could repeat the
combination of moves, stressing the ones that worked better.

3. My Images
Before taking the photographs, my class and I spoke about how we could get the most
out of our pictures and we agreed that our focal point of the images, (Our teacher),
would have to wear bright coloured clothing so that she would show up clearly.
Additionally, we agreed that the backdrop behind our focal point would have to be plan
and dull coloured as it would bring out the vibrant colours we wanted to represent as
motion. With this in hand, we set to work trying different ways of taking the
photographs and different settings on the camera. I found that my camera, (Canon
100D), produced the best images when on the settings of ISO 500, f-stop 10 and a
shutter speed of 25 seconds. I believe that the images composed were of very good
quality and captured just what was needed to accurately replicate Bill Wadman’s
photography. Below shows an example of his photography, a screen shot of when I
was adjusting settings in Photoshop and my finished image.