Hyperion Hoop Photoshoot

This past Sunday, I was doing some still photography during an instructional and demonstration video shoot for my friend Scott’s Hyperion Hoop (a programmable LED hula hoop) product. It’s pretty damn slick and the effects the hoops can do are quite amazing, especially when in the hands of some skilled hoopers like Gina, Ash, and Cailin.

I just delivered a large batch of shots yesterday, but I’ve included a few of my favorites throughout this blog post. Enjoy!

The shoot itself was a fun challenge since I wanted to shoot at a low shutter speed in order to capture the movement of the hoops and show off the patterns. It was a technique I haven’t really used much before so it was a good learning experience.

I wasn’t able to shoot at a really slow speed though, because the videographer discovered that her tripod was broken, and so I let her borrow mine. This meant I had to do everything handheld and make sure not to go too low on the speed so as to avoid excessive camera shake.

While I could have stolen the tripod back at some point, I decided that I liked keeping the speed where it was because I could maintain a nice balance between showing the motion and LED pattern effects while still keeping the basic shape of the hoop intact, as well as keeping the performers fairly sharp and clear. Another technique used to help keep the performers clear was to fire an off-camera flash set to second-curtain sync so that it would fire at the end of the exposure and help freeze the motion of the performer.

Of course, I also had to get a few behind the scenes shots:

Special thanks to EtherealFX for providing the studio space and ambient stage lighting for the shoot!