woodland photoshoot in kentish countryside
- Katie Hutchings
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
I had a free few hours on a May Bank Holiday and I wanted to flex my location shoot muscles as I have been mainly studio-based during the winter months. I rallied up a few of my dance students and we found a nice patch of woodland and open fields near Offham in Kent. It's a beautiful, quiet village near West Malling.
I had some ideas floating around in the ether from a few years’ worth of Pinterest collections. I mainly just wanted to go with the flow and not put any pressure on myself or the dancers, feel the vibe and go from there. In other words, trust in spontaneity!
I wanted to capture the idea of motion and the fact that they are dancers (I am not so much a fan of held poses in photoshoots). So I encouraged movement to flow and I played around with shutter speed settings, creating some motion blur and a rather ethereal effect in some images.
I brought along a trusty piece of sheer material, and when we stumbled across a horizontal branch creating a natural curtain pole above the pathway, it was the perfect opportunity to throw the material over it. It created depth, and a place for the dancers to hide and be distracted by whilst I snapped away.
Whilst I worked with individual dancers, I tasked the rest of them to create group ideas. They found a tree and layered themselves in front and around the tree, and it looked as though they had lived there as forest fairies their entire lives.
It was a great way to spend a couple of hours and it was something they were looking forward to as a break from school exams! Here are the results.
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