Shooting motion is always awesome. You always get unique shots, but that also means that you can never do the same thing exactly the same.

So what’s important to capture?

According to some the eyes have to be in the frame, and everything has to be razor sharp…. Etc

Well when I shoot a normal portrait I often agree. Closest eye has to be the sharpest area of the shot. But… There are always exceptions of course.

I would prefer an image that has power and a story with a maybe slightly less perfect focus over an image that has everything perfect but is boring.

Don’t be too much focussed on technique. A good image tells a story, evokes emotion and that’s 100x more important than mailing that focus.

Now if you nailed the moment but the image is a bit blurry…should you panic?

No….. And this started as a joke but it’s actually true (unless you really messed up) if you have the perfect moment but a slight missfocus or blur just make the image black and white, add some noise and contrast and voila instant art.

Now this might seem like a joke. But it’s actually not. By converting to BW we actually make the image more powerful in most cases and taking the attention away from the errors you might have made. Now the adding of noise/grain also helps. When we see the grain sharp our brains somehow “block” the notion that there is a slight missfocus or blur in the shot.

Or it’s maybe because we know from heart that some film images simply were not sharp so we take a bit less notion of it.

Now I talk of course about slight. This won’t work if you’ve really messed up of course. But slight mistakes are masked perfectly with a proper bw conversion.

Ok so what to show.

Eyes are always good of course but like you see in today’s example it’s also perfectly right to only show the mouth.

Always remember that photography is an art form and with art it has to work. There are no real rules. Which doesn’t mean you can do whatever but if a mouth tells the story better than the eyes..focus on the mouth 😉

Hope this helps.