Too sexy for your camera: portraits in motion

Camera fanatics of all stripes should find this a lively time of year, with the annual Photo Marketing Association trade show just around the corner and the Consumer Electronics Show recently passed. But to keep things in perspective, I'd like to devote a few words to another important topic: fashion.

Last week was Fashion Week here in New York, and Olympus played host. That means the doors were thrown wide open to scraggly technology-journalism types who would normally be barred from the premises for showing up with out-of-season shoes and a no-name bag. Not only did Olympus get me a seat where I was nearly in danger of being gored by a stiletto, the company also set up a model shoot in the park for our little group of fashion photographer wannabes and handed me one of its new Evolt E-300 SLRs.

Taking pictures of seven-foot women striding down a catwalk under the glare of an artificial noon is not the easiest of photographic tasks. However, it has a surprising number of factors in common with any typical snapshot session: You're trying to take a compelling picture of someone in particular who is moving fast in front of a distracting background of couture aficionados--well, close enough. In any case, the portrait in motion is a photograph that millions of people take every day, so here are my Fashion Week-inspired thoughts on how to make yours stand out. I'll provide the music; you bring the style.

• A-U-T-O-matic
  When you're photographing people, this is spelled P-O-R-trait mode. Yes, this is obvious advice, but there's a reason why you'll find it on just about every camera: it works reasonably well. Portrait modes open up the aperture in your camera to blur out the background a bit and meter your subject for the right exposure. Some also adjust the color balance and other image parameters for optimal skin tones. If you prefer to shoot with automatic settings--or if you're a big Prince fan--you can stop right here. All the rest of you control freaks, read on.



• Fix up, look sharp
  The conventional hallmark of a portrait is having a sharp subject against an out-of-focus background. You can achieve this effect by using a very wide aperture--in other words, the lower the f-stop number, the blurrier the background. Just make sure your subject is in sharp focus; since you're decreasing the depth of field, you don't have much room to play with.



• Run run run run run run run away
  If you'd really like to vaporize the background into an atmospheric blur, put some distance between yourself and your subject, and use a lens with a long focal length: longer than 100mm in 35mm-camera equivalent terms. You might have noticed that a lot of sports close-ups have extremely blurry backgrounds; that's because sports photographers are sitting on the sidelines with 200mm and 300mm lenses.



• Time may change me, but I can't trace time
  Sure you can--just change your shutter speed. Freezing motion isn't the only way to approach a moving subject. Experiment with shutter speeds slower than 1/60 second to capture a bit of motion blur.



• Twist and crawl
  Move around and try framing your subject from different angles. Get down low or climb up on something to shoot from above. Set your camera on a slow shutter speed and try panning it to follow your subject's motion as you release the shutter. Panning takes some practice to do well, but it lets you keep a sharp subject in front of a motion-blurred background.



• I will take the sun in my mouth
  But maybe that's not really where you want it. Pay attention to where light and shadows are falling on your subject, especially on the face. Remember that the brighter and harder the light, the stronger the shadows on your subject will be. You can lighten them up with a fill flash for a more natural effect, or you can underexpose a little to emphasize the shadows. Don't always aim for the middle ground. A silhouette or a very high-key photo (that is, one with more highlights than shadows and midtones) can make a compelling portrait.



• Danger, danger! High voltage!
  There's a lot you can do with a flash when your subject is moving, but avoid the kind of flat, blown-out look that results from blasting someone coming right at you with the in-camera flash. You can capture a sharp subject with some peripheral motion blur by using a slow-sync flash. If your camera has a rear-curtain (a.k.a. second-curtain or rear-sync) flash setting, use that to get motion trails behind your subject instead of in front. And if you use a lot of flash, get yourself an external unit.



• Want you to know I'm a rainbow too
  But that may not work for you photographically. Paying attention to your white-balance setting is important in any sort of portrait because skin tones don't look good with slight color casts. If you're going to use a color cast, make it strong so that everyone can see it's an artistic choice and not jaundice. Tinkering with contrast and saturation settings is another way to create rich skin tones in a portrait. You might want to save that for Photoshop or raw-file-processing software, but if you have time to experiment with your camera, you can come up with a combination of settings that gives your subjects a distinctive look. To start, try lowering contrast and saturation a couple of notches.



• I remember how the darkness doubled
  You may have been using the wrong metering mode. For portraits of any kind, using an average metering mode that measures the light in the whole frame to calculate exposure is usually the worst choice. Center-weighted exposure is the most popular mode for shooting portraits, and it works well if the subject is in the middle of the frame or nearly filling it. If you compose your shot with the subject off to one side, a spot meter will help you get the right exposure. Select the spot meter, point your camera straight at the subject, depress the shutter release halfway to lock exposure (most cameras will do this), then reframe your image for the composition you want and shoot.



• Sends me into hyperspace when I see her pretty face
  OK, but don't become fixated on the face. Since we human beings have a ceaseless fascination with other people's faces, that's what most portraits show. But you can compose a shot that doesn't even include the face to reveal something distinctive and expressive about a person, especially when that person is moving around.

You'll have to come up with the rest yourself---I'm off to pack my faux piranha-skin valise and jet down to Orlando for PMA 2005. Check in with us at the end of the week for coverage of the show.

In the meantime, you can share your own motion-portrait techniques in TalkBack. Please don't forget to include a soundtrack.