Way back in January this year I mentioned in a blog post that I was in the planning stages of a photo shoot involving about 50 people, and that although I didn’t know then when it would happen, I knew it would require a reasonable amount of thought up front both in terms of the lighting and the general management of the shoot. What I didn’t mention at the time was what all 50 subjects would have in common – they were all going to be children, with an average age of about 7.
I had to photograph each child individually and with their siblings, and I had about 5 hours to get everyone photographed. That worked out at 6 minutes per child, which didn’t feel like it would be a lot of time given the young age of the subjects and my desire to get them all posing naturally and looking happy. With that quantity of shots to be taken in that short a time I simply had to keep the shoot moving, but without sacrificing the quality of the images. The key to keeping the quality up would be getting the setup tied down early.
The shoot has now happened but I can’t really share any photos from the shoot itself with you. However I can share a couple of setup shots today, and tomorrow I’ll share a couple of fun shots I took during a break in the session, which together will show you the lighting and style of photography I was using for the pictures, and the approach I took to managing the shoot.
Although the photo at the top of this post is technically a setup shot, I think it also kind of works as a standalone portrait. The subject, Matthew, was my assistant for the day and proved particularly useful when I was setting up the lights before the kids arrived. With the 5 hour time constraint in play I wanted to be pretty sure that I could spend practically all of my time focused on interacting with the kids and very very little time worrying about the technical aspects of the shoot like the exposure or lighting. Which meant that in the 40 minutes or so I had to setup I needed to achieve lighting that was consistently repeatable. The first stage in this was to kill the ambient light, so that I could artificially (and therefore consistently) light the subjects with (in this case) three speedlights.
Because I was lighting the photos with speedlights my first step in killing the ambient light was to put my shutter speed at the max sync speed of 1/250s. I kept my ISO at the usual starting point of 200, and working my aperture from a starting point of f/2.8 kept closing it until I got little or no ambient light falling on the set. At f/10 I got the following:
Not quite killed, but pretty close. There were two reasons not to try to kill it further. Firstly, I was happy with the depth of field that f/10 would give me, but didn’t really want to start going much beyond that – for a start I’d risk blemishes in the background showing up, which would make post-production more time consuming. Multiply that by 50 subjects and it’s alot of extra effort. Secondly, a smaller aperture would mean I’d need more power from my flashes to bring the subject exposure back up and more power would mean less battery life and longer recycle times – this in particular I wanted to avoid. The figure I had in my head was to keep below 1/2 power on the flashes, but 1/4 power or less would be nice.
As it turned out, the 1/4 power desire wasn’t to be – the background lights (two SB-600s, either side of the background, bare and zoomed to 50mm) needed to be at 1/2 power, while the main light (an SB-800 through my new and wonderful Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe Softbox at camera right) ended up at 2/5 power. As I was at my max sync speed and couldn’t close the shutter any further to allow me open up the aperture and still kill the ambient light, I had to live with this.
With the lighting setup and the test shots looking good it was time to note all the settings on the camera and lights, and to mark the position of the lights on the floor in case stuff got moved. That done, all I needed was a subject. Or 50 of them. More on how I managed that part of the shoot (with some assistance) tomorrow.
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