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: often your challenge is to take compelling photos of someone who is moving fast in front of a distracting background. The portrait in motion is a photograph that millions of people take every day, so here are some thoughts on how to make yours stand out.

Use your camera’s portrait mode
When you’re photographing people, set your camera to portrait mode. Yes, it’s 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.

Use a long lens and step back from your subject
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.

Experiment with shutter speeds
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.

Get yourself into the prime shooting location
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.

Keep an eye on your light source
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.

Experiment with flash settings
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.

By Aimee Baldridge, CNET editor

from: CNET