Dance photography, at night, with Christmas lights

[lfoush]

I am wanting to do a photoshoot in the dark of a dancer in her tutu next to a lampost wrapped somehow in Christmas lights- maybe incorporate them into the tutu. My shoot is inspired by balletzaida and if you go to
Ballet Zaida: Asteria - ZaidaPhotography's Photos you can see my vision. I don't necessarily want the surroundings exposed, mainly the dancer and the lights. How would I expose for that, and get the lights and the dancer to turn out sharp? I'm assuming I would use a tripod. I'm 16, an amateur photographer and I own a Nikon d3100 with the kit lens as well as a 50-200 mm zoom lens. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[bratkinson]

With a kit lens, you'll definitely need a tripod for longer exposures, something like 1/30th of a second, perhaps slower, with ISO set fairly high. The reason for the long exposures is the smaller aperture size of your lenses, even when opened to their maximum. Of course, any exposures slower than roughly 1/100th of a second would likely have motion-blur unless the dancer "poses" as best as possible. The tripod would eliminate camera shake at those longer shutter speeds.

As far as lighting, I'd probably look to find some place that's fairly well lit. Using a flash would tend to wash out the available lighting. Experiment freely with shutter speeds and see what gives the best results. Then bracket each shot at + or - one or two clicks of shutter speed. Keeping in mind your distance from the subject and the aperture size controls the depth-of-field (the "thickness" of the plane of acceptable focus), so shooting wide open may not yield having all the surrounding ligthing in focus.