Tips for capturing compelling Athlete Portraits

An ideal Athletic portrait depicts an athlete’s true personality and magnifies their persona to their fans, teammates, and coaches. The professional athletic portrait can be considered a calling card to build their brand, reputation and career. Here are five tips for capturing compelling athlete portraits:

1. Eye Contact - Eyes are main attraction of face, and has remarkable impact on an image. When shooting portraits, the thumb rule is to focus on the person’s eye since eyes is the focal point of an image. Convey emotion in your shot, by including laughter, surprise, intensity & passion. These kinds of shots create relationship, and connection.
2. Composition - The most followed rule for composition is ‘Rule of thirds’ but there is no need of sticking to traditional techniques every time, you can push the creativity by placing your subject dead center or off to one edge. You can also enhance image quality by using a solid color backdrop that enhances their skin tone and uniform color and brings out overall color and contrast.
3. Lighting - While there are numerous lighting in portraits, the choice of lighting depends upon the kind of portrait you want to capture. You can experiment with side-lighting, back-lighting, and silhouetting the subject. For creating softness or hardness in shadows, you can make use of lighting modifiers like Soft boxes, reflectors etc. If you get inspired by seeing any existing lighting portrait, you can follow their lighting set up to achieve desired impact.
4. Candid shots - Though portraits are shot in pre-arranged settings, and are all about posed shots. However, you will be surprised to see the result, you achieve with the candid shots such as when athlete is tying their shoelace, adjusting their gear, playing with props, having a natural laugh. Candid shots are a great way to reflect true personality of the athlete and look natural. On the contrary, posed shots can sometime make them nervous or uncomfortable.
   
5. 
   Props - Props are a great way to add point of interest in the image. For athlete portraits, props such as gear, rackets, trophies or medals, uniforms, balls, and sticks adds a story and drama to the image. Let them play around with prop, or make them pose with prop up close to their face, this will tell the subject’s full story in a compelling way.