Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Long Exposure Dance Shoot

I had an opportunity to work with two young dancers from the National Ballet School of Canada. We decided to play with some long exposure photography. I had a lot of fun with these talented dancers.

Strobe effect wings

Jump motion

3 exposure stack

- London Dance Photo - I am Mark Ruddick, an experienced photographer working in London, ON. I enjoy photographing dancers and really appreciate the athleticism and artistry involved. Coming from a fight photography background, I have developed my technique to capture rapidly moving subjects at high speed in front of the lens. The resulting instinct for timing fight photography has lead to an ability to capture my subjects at the peak of their motion in an artistic way.

Let me capture the photos that move you.

Blurry photos are your worst enemy. It never fails to happen, everything is going great, and you are loving what you are getting. Then You Load the Images on Your Computer and Are So Disappointed: check out this blog post by Pixpa on motion blur featuring tips on managing shutter speed and camera shake to get the best blurry photos.

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Edge Lighting with Tiffany

Tiffany volunteered to help me with some single light bodyscapes using a single bare speedlight. She hit some very nice poses and helped as I was experimenting with the lighting. It is a finicky lighting setup where a couple of inches or degrees can really change how the light hits the body. I’m very pleased with the results and I have a few more experiment shoots planned to really refine the technique. I specifically stayed away from tutorials and how-to-videos so I could play with this on my own without having preset ideas and rules in my head.

Laying on her side, I did use 2 bare speedlights for this images aimed at the shoulder and glute

Single light, full length image. Just a single strip of lit skin.

Simple seated image with the light coming across her back

Lines of her raised back

Using two lights to side light the model

- The Athletic Implied Nudes series is an exploration of the human body under muscle stress— understanding the body’s strength, flexibility, and power. Clean backgrounds, hard lighting, and black & white photography work together to eliminate distractions and highlight the muscle groups and figure of my subjects.

Beginning with Mixed Martial Artists and Boxers, I have developed my technique to capture rapidly firing muscle groups at high speed in front of the lens. The resulting instinct for timing fight photography has lead to an ability to freeze my subjects at the peak of their motion. Discovering a better understanding of the human form with this project has transitioned into my commercial fitness work, maximizing composition and positioning to best showcase the human form.

- Mark Ruddick Photography is a full service London, Ontario photographer who specializes in fitness, bodybuilding and fight photography.

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Lighting Experiment with Caitlin (NSFW)

I wanted to practice some edge light bodyscapes and portraits. I brought a model to the studio to practice with, Caitlin. Caitlin is a life drawing model so she’s used to holding dynamic poses while I moved and modified the lights. She was fantastic to work with and came armed with a series of her own poses. The goal was to create some dramatic, black and white, nude images. I mostly use 1 or 2 unmodified speedlights for the shoot. I want to get a couple of modifiers and retry again with more practical knowledge.

Lit with a single speed light.

Female bodyscape

2 side light dramatic picture

Lighting the back and the leg.

In profile

Seated

- Mark Ruddick Photography is a full service London, Ontario photographer who specializes in fitness, bodybuilding and fight photography

- The Athletic Implied Nudes series is an exploration of the human body under muscle stress— understanding the body’s strength, flexibility, and power. Clean backgrounds, hard lighting, and black & white photography work together to eliminate distractions and highlight the muscle groups and figure of my subjects.

Beginning with Mixed Martial Artists and Boxers, I have developed my technique to capture rapidly firing muscle groups at high speed in front of the lens. The resulting instinct for timing fight photography has lead to an ability to freeze my subjects at the peak of their motion. Discovering a better understanding of the human form with this project has transitioned into my commercial fitness work, maximizing composition and positioning to best showcase the human form.

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Dance Photoshoot with Nicolette and Claire

Dancers Nicolette and Claire came to the studio to help me test out some new lighting. I was playing around with the strobe setting on my speedlights to capture multiple images on the same exposure. The ladies were talented dancers and provided some great poses for testing. I was pretty pleased with the test, but I definitely have some work to do. Afterwards we shot a few poses with more conventional lighting. Thanks to my Fanshawe work placement student, Clayton Durrell, for assisting during the shoot and for acting as a manual rear curtain flash on the one image.

2 dancers, 8 flashes

Strobe with rear-curtain flash

A simple skirt drop makes this lovely image.

Simple stretch en pointe.

I like how quiet this image is.

- London Dance Photo - I am Mark Ruddick, an experienced photographer working in London, ON. I enjoy photographing dancers and really appreciate the athleticism and artistry involved. Coming from a fight photography background, I have developed my technique to capture rapidly moving subjects at high speed in front of the lens. The resulting instinct for timing fight photography has lead to an ability to capture my subjects at the peak of their motion in an artistic way.

Let me capture the photos that move you.


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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Lighting fun with Karate Black Belt Alysha

Alysha came back into the studio after our chance meeting a couple of weeks ago to play with some great kicks. We decided to try some long exposure, multiple exposure and fog lighting. Alysha is incredibly skilled and has perfect control of her motion so she was an ideal candidate for this lighting.

A shout out to my lighting mentor Sean Allot who showed me so much about lighting that I'm able to experiment like this properly.

Thanks to Stephen Yule for being a most excellent assistant last night.

Here are a few images and a behind the scenes video from last night.

The final image from the video

More long exposure

Jumping side kick in the fog

Karate Stance

- Mark Ruddick Photography is a full service London, Ontario photographer who specializes in fitness, bodybuilding and fight photography

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Top Down Shoot with Jaclyn (NSFW)

I wanted to try a different lighting scheme and camera perspective than I normally use. Jaclyn was kind enough to help me out with it even though the space and setup were restrictive to her movements. She worked really hard at posing with the constraints of the frame. She did a great job coming up with compelling poses.

I mounted the camera on a boom and shot straight down. For lighting I used two very large softboxes, gelled with red, horizontally oriented, cross lighting the model at camera left head and camera foot. Many thanks to Sean for helping me with the setup, including the heavy lifting.

Jaclyn and I went through the images and picked out some great images to edit

One of my favourites from the shoot.

We were testing the setup, notice the socks to keep the model warm.

- Mark Ruddick Photography is a full service London, Ontario photographer who specializes in fitness, boxing and mma photography

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Long Exposure Dance Shoot with Deanna

I'd like to start off with saying thank you to Sean Allott, over the past couple of years he has taught me so much about photographic lighting. (Amongst other things) His continued support and guidance has made me a better photographer. One of the first things he taught me was "model safety is very important, model comfort is not, just get the shot" The other night he showed me mixed continuous and strobe lighting to show motion trails on a moving subject. It was a very cool lighting experiment for me. It's important to experiment and grow your skill set.

The model for this photo shoot was Deanna. We played around with some dance moves and other poses. She was super patient as I was learning a new lighting setup while using a camera I had never shot with before. I think we got some really cool looking shots and next time I will definitely be better and more creative with the process.

Makeup for the shoot was courtesy of Melissa O Makeup

I played around with mixed continuous light and strobes for different visual effects as well as multiple strobes fires within the same exposure.

- Mark Ruddick Photography is a full service London, Ontario photographer who specializes in fitness, boxing and mma photography

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Teaser Image from Shoot with Scarlett Edwards

I had a great shoot last night with Scarlett Edwards, a talented model. I was trying out some single light techniques to improve my lighting skills. For the image below I used a single strobe on a boom directly over the model. The light had a gridded reflector and barndoors to shape the light. We tried a lot of different poses. The idea was to illuminate the shoulders and upper buttocks while keeping the back in shadow. Initially all of the images were to be shot in black and white, but when I saw how her red hair popped off the black background, I had to go with colour.

I'll eventually post more from the set, but they will not be SFW or Facebook friendly.

F11 / 1/200th / ISO 100 - gridded reflector right above the model.

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Mark Ruddick Mark Ruddick

Makeup Shoot with Sarah

Sometimes I like to do non-fitness / fight photography to improve and keep skills sharp. I teamed up with Sarah (model) and Melissa O'Leary (makeup) to do some beauty pictures last week. Here's a sneak peak. A simple 2 light setup with a reflector

Model: Sarah Cur Makeup: Melissa O Makeup

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