Jason,
I would recommend print film of at least 400 speed, but 800 would probably
be even better. Kodak makes Portra films in these speed ranges with choices
of either Natural Color or Vivid Color. Both should reproduce skin tones
well as they are designed for portraits. For metering, I would recommend
taking a gray card reading in the same light as the skaters before the
figure skating starts and then set the camera to manual mode. If the
lighting changes a lot, then you'll do better with spot or partial metering.
For focus, make sure you are in AI-Sever versus one shot focus. If your AI
isn't working fast enough, set your lens to manual focus and pre-focus on a
spot and get ready to take the picture. Also, panning as slower shutter
speeds should give you interesting results as well. Panning takes practice,
so you may have to go to a few shows and see your results before you decide
what shutter speed gives you best results when panning. Is flash
photography prohibited? If not, panning with second curtain sync on an EX
flash will give some blur with the skaters frozen at the moment of the
flash. You may want to set the flash exposure comp to -1/2 or -1 to keep
the skaters more in balance with background for the these second curtain syn
shots. For panning, try starting around 1/8 sec and see how that works.
Anyway, good luck. Remember, film is cheap, the shots you get could be
priceless.
Cheers, JD
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