A second of feeling that lasts a lifetime

A studio can tell you a lot about its owner, can’t it? Take Canon Ambassador Clive Booth. His tells the story of someone who feels a palpable thrill at the idea of new technologies, but – like the 16th century cottage it resides in – finds beauty and depth in the timeless. So, it feels both right and fitting that his most recent project The Silence After Applause has a foot in both worlds.

Foot, of course, couldn’t be a more appropriate word for this latest work with Birmingham Royal Ballet. His relationship with them goes back to 2018, when he did the first ever studio shoot to launch the EOS R system. As time went on, Clive was able to indulge his love of imaging technology and experiment in capturing their artistry in new and exciting ways, such as his immersive film A Swan’s Story, filmed in 8K stereoscopic VR with the Canon RF 5.2mm DUAL FISHEYE lens and EOS R5 C Cinema EOS camera.

However, The Silence After Applause was different.

“I once saw someone hold a smartphone in one hand and say, ‘with this, I take notes’,” recalls Clive. “Then he held up his camera saying, ‘with this, I write a novel’” It’s the perfect analogy for Clive’s career and work, which began when, as a student graphic designer, all roads ended at print. And, largely, today is no different. This fundamental understanding of its language means that, along with an artist’s eye for storytelling and a graphic designer’s eye for impact, he knows not only how to ‘write the novel’, but to make people want – even need – to read it.

His concept was to capture the dancers in those unseen seconds after they leave the stage, where they are in a mental and physical space like no other. “It was elation, often, and also a sort of relief, but sometimes despair too. I wanted to tell this story through portraiture.” And these images were to accompany Birmingham Royal Ballet and their specialist clinical team to Expo 2025 in Osaka Japan, where they had been invited to both represent arts and culture in the UK and present important new research on the physical impacts of elite performance in dance.

"It was a project where I wanted to extract the absolute most from my Canon EOS R5 Mark II,” explains Clive. “So, what do I do? I go to print. I believe it’s the best way to bring craft back to photography.” His natural instinct for print means that he doesn’t consider it as an ‘output’ in the way that one might expect. Instead, it is front of mind, as he stands in the darkness, even before he has raised his camera. Every droplet of sweat, anguished expression or scream of joy races through his mind and he instinctively composes the scene, adjusting his shooting style, translating the light, texture and emotion to scale, surface and colour.

When the curtain has closed, back at the studio, away from the applause, Clive openly admits that, for him, this is where the fun starts.

“I ingest the pictures into Adobe Lightroom, and then I'll start with a one star edit,” he explains. “When I reach five-star edits, I begin to collaborate – often my agent will join me by Zoom and for these shots, I also brought in Tom [Rogers, former Principal dancer and now Creative Content Producer for Birmingham Royal Ballet]. The three of us edited together, and we had such a great time.”

From the thousands of images, taken across four productions and over many months, Clive was able to pinpoint those which most expressed the inner worlds of the dancers, and the beauty of print meant that these living instants could rise to the surface – even spill over.

The untrained eye, however, only processes the subtle nuances of feeling, not realising the levels of colour calibration that goes into taking each image from camera to paper.

“I use an EIZO monitor, which is the glue for my entire colour managed workflow,” he says. “And I’m surrounded by LED lights that are calibrated to the same temperature. Basically, this means that what I see on screen is what I get on the paper when I print my proofs onto the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 A2 or PRO-2600 24" printers.”

When he selected Hanhnemühle Digital FineArt Paper in Natural Line Bamboo Gloss Baryta as his surface for these works, it was not simply because of the quality, but because it’s 200 years archival. “Which doesn’t mean much to most people until you tell them that this is around eight generations. Your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren could be looking at that same picture.” When he was satisfied that his proofs were perfect, the files headed to be printed on the imagePROGRAF PRO-4600 44” printer before being shipped to Japan for their unveiling. But this is far from the end of the story because Clive will never pass up the opportunity to work in new formats that let him experiment with how a photograph is experienced, not just how it is taken.

Elevated print, for example, challenged him to frame his ideas in language, not just image. Used to award-winning effect in World Unseen, when combined with audio and braille, it creates an incredible experience of photography for those who are blind or partially sighted. But shooting a scene that will be elevated with print on the Canon Arizona printer, using PRISMAelevate XL software, required Clive to layer detail upon detail, telling the story in the same way as a hand might pass over the image.

“It was a single image narrative that needed much more in the background,” he explains. “So, we have the dancer, Mathilde, the stage, the props, even the markings on the floor. You can feel that she's standing en pointe and even the ribbing on her dress.”

In addition to this, he simply couldn’t resist leaning once more into his graphic designer roots and also produced eighteen lenticular portraits of the dancers. Formed through a technique that combines images which then appear to move when viewed from different angles, the lenticulars delighted visitors to Expo 2025 Japan.

“They were lit by spotlights and change as you walk past. It’s unbelievably cool,” he smiles broadly. “One of the girls lifts her finger up to her mouth to shush you. Another laughs, one kisses. It just looks stunning.”

It was undoubtedly bold to tell the stories of dancers, in all their vitality and motion, using the static mediums of print and photography. But the end results feel like there is actually more detail than less – especially when the images are combined with the fascinating clinical research they were commissioned to support.

Ballet often feels like a secret world to audiences, but those seconds passing from stage to wings are deeper, unspoken and almost impossible to describe, even by the dancers themselves.

Indeed, when they saw their photographs for the first time at a special preview, they appeared to feel it all once more, running the gamut of emotions. And this is what print has the power to do. Seeing images in their most tangible form can pack the kind of unexpected emotional punch that stays with you far beyond the experience.

Or, as Clive would put it, “if we, as visual storytellers, can tell a tale simply through a photograph – just ink on paper – and it can move people, then we've won, haven't we?”