Too sexy for your camera: Portraits in motionTaking 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 vaporise 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. | |||||||||||||||||
Bluff it as a fashion photographer
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