Bill Wadman

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”

Bill Wadman’s WorkBill 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.

My ImagesBefore 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.