Pixiq

Leggy supermodels may be attractive, but they are also fast and like a wedding shooter capturing a bride’s walk down the aisle with her father, you only get one chance. You’re also working under tricky lighting conditions and more often than not, no flash is allowed. My comments are aimed specifically at NYC’s Fashion Week but the challenges are the same at many,, including local, fashion shows.

A press pass to shoot runway shows at Fashion Week from the photographer’s riser is a “hot ticket” and armed with a press pass you get prime shooting space on a riser large enough to hold 15-20 professional photographers but there will be 50-60 of them! The old pros arrive early and mark a “reserved” spot on the riser 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. Before each show, photographers are placed in a holding pen and are admitted just before the audience. When you get in, take a few, you just have a few minutes to assess the available shooting spaces, pick one, and stay there! Once in place, the next challenge to overcome is lighting.

All the Fashion Week photographs you see here were made under the available light. No flash is allowed at Fashion week. The runways appear brightly lit—and they are—but with tungsten lighting set up for TV not still cameras. What’s more the halls are sometimes painted different colors and some have black walls and some are white and all of the runway lights are not turned on until seconds before the show begins and when it starts it happens fast so you need to be prepared.

You can set the camera’s white balance control on Tungsten, use a color meter to set a specific color temperature (if time and your camera 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 “source. Or you can do what I did: Ask another shooter who told me the color temperature was 3600 degrees Kelvin and that’s where I set the Olympus SLR’s white balance. Not all digital SLRs let you set an exact color temperature but if not I would have gone with the tungsten setting. When the first person walked down the runway, I made a photo and chimped the LCD screen and quickly saw color balance was right on.

At the other end of the fashion show world, local venues vary greatly in configuration, where you can stand, and many of them allow flash. Some of shots that appear in this article were made at a local fashion shows using an EX-550 speedlight with Sto-Fen Omni Bounce attached. I think some local shows allow flash because speedlights being fired add drama of the situation. The diffuser helps soften the flash and I consider this inexpensive accessory to be indispensable. All of the local show’s were made with the camera in Auto White Balance mode. I arrived at the site early and had my wife stand on the runway and made flash tests in various locations which helped me determine how I was going to handle lighting, but as usual lighting for the show was radically different and in some shot’s you’ll see that my flash only served as fill allowing some blur (from the ambient light) to show movement.

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