Yoga Photography

A couple of weeks ago, I had the sudden opportunity to photograph a few people performing yoga. They were from the Kaya Yoga group of Davis. Although I personally have a 2 year experience in practicing yoga in my early childhood, I had no previous experience in photographing yoga performance and was at a complete loss about how I approach the shoot. I was in bright sunlight. Thinking fast, I decided to set the camera with certain settings and not experiment when people were actually performing the yogas. From my experience, I knew I will hardly have 5 minutes to shot them in one particular position before they switch and I don’t want to waste that time changing my camera settings (and most certainly I couldn’t ask the people to perform the same position twice just because I wasn’t ready with my camera!). I set the camera ‘Aperture Priority’ mode and changed the value based on my position: If i was trying a closeup shot, I was lowering the F-stop value and for a shot that included a larger focus on the background, I used a higher F-stop value.

To show the extraordinary positions that these people were performing, I was naturally inclined to shoot photos with focus on the entire length of the performers. Additionally, I also wanted to capture some of their hardened expressions to capture the intensity. Unfortunately, I was standing at a considerable distance to not come in their way and I don’t have too many photographs in this area. After I came back home and read more about photographing yoga performers, I realized I was not too far off in my objectives from what is usually done by professionals 🙂 An interview with Ron Sombilon who captures yoga photos regularly is here. Following are some of the shots. I plan to upload some of the other images over time, specially on a dull day to motivate myself 😉 . After this experience, now I really want to photograph yoga performers against the backdrop of a sunset on a sea beach or in the studio with a black screen.