In Shape, but Out of Focus

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/fashion/marathon-photos-often-fail-to-capture-the-glory.html

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LIFE may offer worse comedowns. But not many. You train for your big race. You put in the hours and crank out the miles. All your friends say you look terrific. Marathon morning, you pin on your number, run, sweat and finish. A triumph for you and your fabulous body.

Then, a day or two later, an e-mail arrives: “Your photos are now online!” Below are several thumbnails of you shot by Brightroom or another one of the infernal companies that place photographers along racecourses. Who wouldn’t click through?

Sadly — horribly — the list of ways these photos can and almost always do go wrong is wide and deep: Muffin top. Earthquake quads. Wind in the shorts, making it look as if you’re wearing your derrière backward. Front wedgies. Let’s not even get started on facial expressions.

“Honestly, I’m not sure why more people don’t do this sport,” joked Sally Bergensen, chief executive of Oiselle, a women’s running clothes company she started after noticing in photos that her running shorts poofed at the waist, making her look fat.

Oiselle, along with magazines like Runner’s World and Triathlete, offers forums online for people to post their worst race photos so, Bergensen said, athletes “can howl with laughter and feel less ashamed.” Most cope in more neurotic ways. Some get peeved at the photographers — 110 of whom are expected to be on the New York City Marathon course Sunday — complaining that each time you spot a single-lens reflex camera, you are forced to waste energy debating whether or not to smile.

Geoff Edgers, host of the new Travel Channel series “Edge of America,” redirects his discomfiture into cybersecurity concerns. “It’s just one more public database in which my privacy is violated,” he said. Bad enough that anyone with a nose for snooping can look up anybody’s finishing time. “If someone has a hunch I’m running in the B.A.A. Half Marathon,” he said of the race in Boston, “all they have to do is plug my name into the Brightroom Web site and they can get pictures of me in my Loverboy headband with saliva all over my face.”

My husband describes looking at his triathlon images as “soul destroying.” “I am their most willing customer, I am so ready to spend big,” he said of Brightroom, which charges $39.99 for four 5-by-7 prints, or $59.99 to download your entire photo gallery from a race. “But then you start clicking through the pictures, and the mortification just builds and builds. The camera pretty consistently fails to capture my own sense of speed. I feel like a gazelle and yet I look like a hippo.”

The bodysuits favored by triathletes don’t help matters. “It’s really a screaming humiliation, that outfit I wear,” he said. “There’s this terrible disconnect between how I feel” — which he describes as a sleek, tanned and shaven Alberto Contador —  “and what the camera captures in those photos, which is a pale, pink, middle-aged guy squeezed into a Lycra onesie with his shoulders puffing out.”

Of course, great race photos do exist, but frankly they’re so rare that Zeddie Little became the Internet meme “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy” after a photographer caught him last spring in the Cooper River Bridge Run in Charleston, S.C., looking fantastic. Mr. Little had not seen a race picture of himself before, so he did not quite understand the fuss. “I mean, I knew the picture was funny, but was it really that funny?” he said last week.

Still, Sean Walkinshaw, director of business development at Brightroom Inc., predicts that a third of the runners in the New York City Marathon (there were more than 47,000 finishers in 2011) will buy one of the million photos his company will take during the race. Brightroom’s overall rate is closer to 5 percent, he said, but more people buy photos from destination races because most have already spent a lot on airfare and hotels. (Race organizers said Tuesday that the marathon would go on as scheduled this Sunday, though most likely with fewer runners than in past years because of travel problems and other logistical issues associated with Hurricane Sandy.)

Brightroom photographers will be at 17 locations in New York, including the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, McCarren Park in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, Columbus Circle in Manhattan and, of course, the finish line in Central Park. Some cameras will be aerial, too.

Runners who want to increase the odds of ending up with a good photo would be wise to plan ahead. “The biggest challenge is spotting that photographer, and when you do, channel your inner Kenyan and run really fast,” said Dimity McDowell Davis, co-author of the books “Run Like a Mother” and “Train Like a Mother.” “Think of yourself as really light, suspended from the sky.” Runners with two feet on the ground look as if they are walking. Photographers hired to shoot individual runners aim to capture them in the air on the way down. Ideal images also include the runner’s face and shoulders relaxed, eyes gazing into the distance, lips slightly parted.

For Corey Rich, an action photographer whose clients include Nike, the North Face and Red Bull: “Rule No. 1 is look the part. If you want great photos, you can’t show up in your ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ training suit. Your clothes need to say, ‘I’m an athlete.’ ” That means athletic-cut sunglasses, and proper running shorts and top. Take a photograph of yourself to see how it all looks.

“And ladies, really, come on,” said Kristin Mayer, who began designing her own triathlon uniforms after realizing she felt better — and thus raced better — if her outfit matched her bike helmet.

You can look beautiful as you whip up on the competition, said Ms. Mayer, who took the bold, edgy aesthetic she created for herself and started Betty Designs. The Betty Designs logo is a skull and butterfly. Her advice: Dark colors in the hip area. Vertical lines that go in a little or fade. Tinted sunscreen. (You don’t want makeup streaming with your sweat.) Braids. (Ponytails look awful in photos, flying off your head or into your face.)

If you’re truly serious about getting a good race photo, scout the course and set up a shot with an iconic background and great light. Then, for the race, plant a friend or loved one in that spot, preferably with a camera that shoots a huge number of frames per second.

“In any one stride, only 10 percent will look graceful,” said Mr. Rich, the photographer. When your foot strikes the ground, your thighs and cheeks follow the impact — not pretty. “I would like to believe that I press the shutter at just the perfect moment,” he said, “but the truth is I’ll shoot 75 frames of a person running past me, and only two might be good.”

Elite athletes with perfect bodies are not immune from race photo embarrassment. Before the swimmer Nathan Adrian won the 100-meter freestyle in the London Olympics over the summer, he was perhaps best known for the picture that bounced around after his swimsuit ripped at a tuneup meet last spring.

“Bending over on the blocks and feeling that snap, that’s never a comfortable feeling,” Mr. Adrian told me. But fortunately (for Mr. Adrian), his ripped-suit photograph was not shot from a great angle. When Ricky Berens’s suit split at the 2009 world championships in Rome, a photographer caught him, let’s just say, full moon. “I’m still not known as the Olympic gold medalist Ricky Berens,” Mr. Berens said. “I’m known as the guy who busted his suit.”

For most of us, the real problem is that we don’t look like the world-class distance runners Kara Goucher or Meb Keflezighi, yet we sort of imagine we do. The photographers hired by Brightroom will do the best they can to sooth marathoners’ vanity and egos. But even Mr. Walkinshaw acknowledges that taking good photos of 47,000 runners traipsing 26.2 miles is tough. “When you pass that camera, you might have a cramp, or feel sick, or be adjusting your shirt,” he said. “It’s a gantlet of things.”

Speedsters cranking out sub-seven-minute miles are easier to capture in the air. The rest of us mortals, good luck. “People always say, ‘Jeez, Brightroom, you always get me at my worst,’ ” Mr. Walkinshaw said, “and I always want to say: ‘That’s the way you’re running. You’ve probably never seen yourself run before.’ ”

Some photographers shout encouragement to coax subjects to smile. More-experienced athletes don’t fall for the ruse. Mark Donaldson, a founder of Battea-Class Action Services, who has run a dozen marathons and 23 ultramarathons, said, “Whenever anybody claps and cheers, ‘Looking good,’ I always say back to them, ‘Liar!’ ”