Art is never created in a vacuum. Whether it’s painting, poetry, dancing or photography, an artist’s work is a reaction to the world around them. It’s a response to inspiration.

“I’ve been shooting professionally for 18 years,” begins Burak, “and I’ve always found inspiration in the human body and its movement. Dance captivates me and it makes me feel joy”.

While capturing the art of dance, he admits, is a challenge, it’s a welcome one. “Photographing movement is always a nice problem to solve. With dance my aim is to respond to the most pure and inspiring moments. But these are fleeting. You need to judge the angle, the focus, the composition, and all the while the subject is moving and changing. With experience you can understand them better, instruct and anticipate, but there are definitely ways to set up your camera that help.”

“A big part of that is shutter speed”, he continues, “but setting it the fastest you can doesn’t take into account what’s going on in front of the lens. You need to think about it in terms of the speed of the subject. Modern dance is a little slower than ballet, so I set the speed to around 1/500sec, but when shooting a ballerina, it’s 1/1000sec, 1/2000sec or even above to freeze them. Of course, there are times I’ll deliberately introduce motion blur by using slower speeds, too”.

To get these speeds, Burak isn’t afraid of lifting his ISO, something with his chosen camera helps him do without compromising quality. “Sometimes, to get the shutter speed I want, I could go as high as ISO 10,000, but it’s not a problem with my Sony Alpha 7R V, because the results are so clean”. He also boosts shutter speed by working with the widest apertures, especially in locations where available light can be scarce, using fast lenses like the FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA keeps his subjects’ dimensions natural.

While he looks to shoot in distinct and varied locations, Burak’s reasoning for shooting in the studio is to play with more conceptual ideas. “Dance is often about expressing ideas through movement, so as a photographer I can experiment with that too. In this shot, I wanted to have the dancer express the joy that a writer feels in their mind when coming up with an idea. It was a simple image to set up in the studio. Ballet dancers have amazing skill and knowledge, and because I’ve watched a lot of ballet, I could tell him exactly what pose I wanted”.

“With modern dancers, it’s a bit different”, he continues. “To me, they are often more involved in the process and need less instruction. Ballet dancers can pull the perfect pose in a split second, but modern dancers are probably more engaged by improvising and creating, and when you are both pulling in the same direction, it’s a wonderful feeling. Either way, I’m always conscious that the photo is made with them, not just by me”.

Also in the studio, Burak gets to bring creative lighting into the process. “I like to use contrasting, coloured lights for many reasons,” he explains. “It’s striking, but the contrast also lets me show the dancer’s body in a way that illustrates the power, the movement, and the dimensionality. It really helps that I’ve also been shooting nudes for nearly 20 years, because with dance you need to understand and show the body in a similar way… to see the muscles, the strength in the arms, legs and core… but like I said before, dance is harder, because every second the body is changing”.

His partner in crime is the Alpha 7R V, with a variety of features that make shooting almost any subject easier. “For dance I definitely rely on the camera’s speed and accuracy. It helps a lot when working with dancers, because they can tire quickly, and you want to get shots right first time if you can. For instance, while I often enjoy timing exposures in single-shot mode, the Alpha 7R V’s 10fps burst setting means I can capture a lot of images during a leap or a turn and pick the best one”.

“The EVF and the AI-powered autofocus help a lot in that regard, too,” he continues. “For example, when working in eye-detection AF mode, the subject can be whirling around and facing away from me, but the camera always knows where the eye is and locks on again when they turn back around. As for the EVF, knowing that what I’m seeing is the picture I’m getting saves me, and the dancer, a lot of time and effort”.

Working with his subjects, responding and innovating, Burak sees no end to his relationship with dance. “It’s a lifelong passion for me”, he finishes, “but one that I especially love because I’m creating alongside another artist. We are both contributing and the Alpha 7R V just makes that collaboration easier.”