After Mark Seliger.

Seliger’s multiple exposure of Baryshnikov — palms up, then palms down. I could have shot two frames, layered them, and nobody would have known the difference.

I didn’t. Baryshnikov is a dancer and my gut told me the way they got this was in one shot, and this is all about the challenge, so I wanted to bring that performance into this.

A long exposure with two strobes crammed into the same modifier: one set to first curtain, one to rear. The light fires twice inside a single shutter and I move in the gap between them. Both hands are in the picture, so the trigger was under my big toe.

The idea wasn’t the hard part — the timing was. Two heads in one modifier, then tuning them so they were neither simultaneous nor too far apart. I was hunting a gap just long enough to change position and still read as a dance, rather than “I hit this pose, pauuuse, then I hit this pose.” Frustrating until the rhythm landed, and then very exciting.

Strobes do first and second curtain natively now. In 2018 I had to MacGyver it.

The grey behind me is a hand-painted canvas my wife painted. We ran a backdrop business together for a while — she painted them, I shipped them to photographers around the world — and we stopped when she went into teaching. I kept a small collection, and I still see ones we sold turning up in other photographers’ feeds.