Twice a year, New York City’s pastoral Bryant Park transforms itself into an international fashion center, complete with huge tents filled with supermodels wearing famous designer’s newest looks. A press pass to shoot runway shows from the photographer’s riser is a hot ticket, and I want to thank Olympus America for giving me this opportunity as well as providing a pre-production model of their new digital SLR, the E-1, to capture all of these images.
Head to Toe: Shooting men’s fashion on a runway is a bit easier than photographing female models, who seem to walk much faster. Guys, by comparison, seem to just stroll along, allowing you to easily capture full-length shots as well as some of the tent’s ambience. Like all of the images in this lesson, this photograph was made with the Olympus E-1 and 50-200mm Zuiko lens. More technical details follow.
Shooting in this kind of show biz environment can be a challenge. All the photographers are crowded together in a special section, albeit one where you can get the best images, but they may be fifty or more shooters from press services along with print and Web-based fashion publications.
The old pros arrive early and mark a “reserved” spot on the floor with gaffer’s tape, with some going as far as to hire students as “line-holders” to sit in the space! New fish like me have to make the best of what’s left and be polite.
The runways in each of the three halls have slightly differing configurations, and depending on how the designer uses that space, the same location on a riser in one tent may not be the best in another. Before each show, photographers are placed in a holding pen and are admitted just before the audience. When you get in, take a few minutes to assess the available shooting spaces, pick one, and stay there! Once in place, the n challenge to overcome is lighting.
Get Tight. A lens like the 50-200mm Zuiko provides the equivalent of 100-400mm in Olympus’ 4/3 digital system, with the long end of the zoom allowing you to show the complex pattern on this model’s shirt along with the unique hair styling designer Custo Barcelona also used with his female models for his innovative show.
All the photographs you see here were made under the available light in the tents. The runways appear brightly lit—and they are—but with tungsten lighting set up for TV, not still cameras. What’s more the lights are not turned on until seconds before the show starts.
When shooting digital you have several choices: You can set the camera’s white balance control on Tungsten; use a color meter to set a specific color temperature (if your camera and time permits); or do a custom white balance once the lights go on. Using a White Card (the flip side of a Kodak Grey Card) you can create a custom white balance, but since the runway itself has a gleaming white covering, it makes a readily available white light source.
Or, you could do what I did: Ask another shooter. Jennifer Graylock (www.graylock.com), a charming and talented New York pro, told me the color temperature in the tents was 3600 degrees Kelvin and that’s where I set the E-1’s white balance. When the first person walked down the runway, I made a photo and checked the E-1’s LCD screen and quickly saw the color balance was right on.
N rule: No flash. Not only does shooting with available light eliminate distracting flashes (and any resultant blinks) it provides an element of safety for the models, especially in tents where the runway is elevated.
Using the light in the tents lets you capture the kind of three-dimensional lighting that on-camera flash seldom permits. Here, the back lighting separated a model’s black coat that would have otherwise receded into the background when using on-camera flash lighting.
What surprised me about photographing models on the runways in Fashion Week is how short the shows are in duration, but intense in focus. An average show is twenty minutes and once the models start prancing down the aisles, you’re busy.
A large capacity memory card minimizes having to switch cards at awkward moments, and I used a speedy and high capacity Lexar (www.lexarmedia.com) 4GB CompactFlash card that’s compatible the Olympus E-1. I asked one photographer using film, maybe the only one, how fast he could change film and he told me, “pretty fast but I’ll miss one or two models and their outfits.” Shooting with a digital camera, I never missed any, not that each of mine are works of art, but that’s another story.
Don’t forget the designer! At the end of the show the designer can be coy and poke his or her head out the door and wave at the audience or they may follow at the ends of the parade of models that wraps up the show! Be ready for whatever happens and use your camera to follow them down the aisle to get some tight shots like this one made at the long end of the 50-200mm Zuiko zoom.
I’d like to take credit for the vignetting effect at the bottom of the frame that focuses attention on Custo’s face but an exuberant videographer got in my way.
Hey, sometimes it’s just better to be lucky than good.
All photographs ©2003 Joe Farace
Joe Farace is Colorado-based photographer/writer who has written 1300 magazine stories and more than twenty books. You can see more of his fashion and glamour images at his SmugMug page at
http://farace.smugmug.com.
