Building up a Groupshot
Groupshots … I seem to have a love/hate relationship with them. There’s so much to think about and usually you don’t have the time to make something creative out of them. But I always enjoy the challenge. And this one was a particullary challenging one. It was done for one of my favorite corporate clients, the Flemish institute for Biotechnology. They needed a groupshot of their Board of Directors. Now, these people don’t meet very often, so there’s no chance for a rematch if you screw up. They added a new floor on top of their building and would have liked it to be included in some way in the picture. First plan was to shoot indoors on the new floor but it became clear very soon that it wouldn’t work for a group this size. So we went outside.
For this kind of assignments I turn up an hour early or so. That way I can scout, setup and test before I get the subjects in front of the camera. There are many good reasons for this way of working:
- These people have more important things to do.
- Time is money. It’s way cheaper to pay me for an extra hour of preparation than to pay 15 people for catching a cold
- Keeping a group focused for longer than 5 minutes is nearly impossible.
- It was freezing cold.
Toghether with the client we opted to use the building as a backdrop. A quick test shot got me in the balpark for a correct exposure.
With a shutter speed of half a second it’s clear that there will be blur from camera shake. I would use a tripod later but for this quick test shot, it’s enough that I can see the exposure of the background. Shooting a building at such a slow shutter speed isn’t difficult with a good tripod. These kind of buildings don’t move that much after all. Having 15 people to stand completely still for half a second is nearly impossible. So I needed to make sure there wasn’t any ambient light falling onto the subjects. After putting a sweater on a nearby lamp, I had a completely dark spot for them to stand. My hand served as a quick stand-in to test that out.
To make completely sure it was like I wanted it to be, I set the camera on a tripod and took a shot of myself (selftimer).
Now I had that right, I set up two speedlights, one on each side of the camera. Light falls off faster when your subject are closer to the lightsource. So to prevent only the people on the side being correctly exposed, I set the flashes rather far from the group. Let me explain: If you would put a flash one meter to the left of subject A and subject B would be one meter to the right of A, then the distance between B and the light source would be double (2 meters) than the distance between the light and A (1 meter). This means, way less light on subject B. Now if you put the light 10 meters from subject A, the distance between B and the light (11 meters) would be only 10% more than the distance between A and the light (10 meters). To make the differences even less, I placed the flashes at an angle of about 45 degrees from the camera and I ‘feathered’ the light. This means that I point the center of the light beam (brightest) towards the furthest subject in the group. This way the edge of the beam (less bright) strikes the nearest person. Not sure if this makes any sense, but it works.
You may have noticed that I have a light/flash meter hanging around my neck. I don’t use it very often, but in this kind of situation it can come in handy to take some readings along the place where the subjects would be standing. This allows me to check if the light is even across the width of the group.
I also noticed that one of the halogen lights, that are supposed to light the building (left of the frame), wasn’t working. So I got out another flash and placed it where the light was. I aimed the flash up and took a quick snap from the hip from where I was standing to check the power and the direction of the flash. If you keep your camera on the same settings as you will use for the shot, you get a good idea about that.
Back at the camera position for the group shot, I found the light to be too white, not powerfull enough and not perfectly aimed.
A CTO (orange) gel, a bit more power and a slight adjustment of the direction, solved the problem. Time to get the group out.
Some dodging and burning in Photoshop as well as softening some accidental harsh shadows (hard to avoid with such a big group in so little time) on the faces, was done to achieve the final result.
One more, a bit wider this time. The RAW image:
After the Photoshop corrections:
It’s crucial to keep talking to the group, otherwise people will start to look at eachother and anywhere but the camera. Keep it fun, but not too funny to avoid people rolling over the floor laughing. It’s hard to avoid ‘blinkers’, so take enough shots. I always try to take 2-3 shots in rapid succession. In case the perfect shot has one blinker, chances are that he has his eyes open in the previous or next shots and that you can easily photoshop the open eyes in the pictures without significant postprocessing time.
Hi Bert,
Great post!!! well infoed and great shot
congrats on the 3rd place in the blog competition
Cheers
Vincent
Hi bert!
Loved the photo when I saw it on Flickr earlier today. Nice that you posted the setup!
Cheers!
Thomas
Thanks Bert, great information and very nice work you are doing
Bert, thanks for this extensive explanation!
Very nice and thanks for the tutorial. I have a question: did you gel the strobes for the key lights for the group? They appear to be white balanced with the background building which I assume is closer to tungsten white balance than the daylight the speedlights produced.
Very cool picture. Great job!
great article, my groups shots skills need some tuning and it is great to see you share your experience. that is one less failure for me in the field.
That’s a very nice peek behind the scenes Bert! Great how you solved the broken building light
Hi Bert,
Thanks for the tutorial.
I have a few questions :
Did you put a CTO or double CTO on your flash on the building side ?
How far away from the group were your flashes eventually ?
Did you use any light modifier (umbrella, grid)on the two main flashes ?
Many thanks & keep up the great work and sharing !
Ghislain
Thanks man! I had never thought of feathering the light for something like this. I do it all the time for portraits but…..’Doh!
Thanks a lot.
There’s a CTO gel on the flash I used to replace the broken light aimed at the building to match the other halogen lights.
I didn’t use any gels on the main lights. I would have been easy to balance the color of the main lights with the background light but I think that would have made the background too flat. The difference in color makes for some more separation.
I think the main lights where between 7 and 10 meters from the group. I didn’t use any umbrella’s or softboxes. At such a distance they would not do much except for eating up some light. To get soft light from a light source that far away, you would have needed huge diffusion panels.
Excellent. It all made perfect sense. I always learn something coming here. Thanks Bert!
Hi Bert, great post.
How did you prevent movement of the subjects at 0.5 sec? Placing them in the dark en no ambient on them, is that the trick?
Thanks,
Rob
How interesting! Thanks for sharing that. It gets me excited about one day transitioning to using flash, but for now that is way out of my price range!
Love keeping up with your blog!
Hi Bert,
Great post! Love the photos and the step-by-step setup information.
Thanks for these answers.
Your attention to details (i.e CTO flash on the side) is what makes the difference between a good and an excellent photographer… reminds me of the Joe Mc Nally shoot where he brightens up a dark window on top of the Empire State Building to balance his composition
Ghislain
Great photo, perfect balance. I love your blog tons of great and much needed information. Keep up the fantastic work!
Hi Bert!
Nice to see something different this time.. since most of your tutorials are single person portraits.
I just bought the Strobist DVD. I’m glad I did because everything that you mentioned here made perfect sense. If not, then I would just be appreciating your work, without understanding a word you said.
It’s also funny that you do the hand exposure test like what you’ll see often in the Strobist DVDs. Others will think you look stupid, but we can’t ignore the fact that it’s effective.
One thing I was taking note of was the eyeglass reflections which was a concern in David’s tutorial. I guess you had that in mind too since I don’t see it in the pics.
Thanks!
it is very well done. those shots are not easy to get right
good job!
Very informative! Thanks a lot for sharing your experience here and in LIME.
Did you have the cars towed away?
Greetings
Thanks for the pile of comments
@Rob: as long as the subjects are unaffected by available light, you can get the shutterspeed as long as you want. They are ‘frozen’ by the short flash for maybe 1/2000 of a second or so.
@Frombrandon: I could have done this without any expensive equipment. If I’d just asked 3 friends to hold a flash and fire it at “3,2,1, go”, it would have worked too. Half a second is plenty of time to trigger a flash manually with some practice.
@Ghislain: I’d rather stay on the ground to take pics
@Pepin: The hand is a great stand-in (now that would be a strange sentence when pulled out of the photography context). Usually there’s no problem with reflections in glasses when the flash is far enough from the camera axis.
@Fabian: I asked the owners of the cars if it was fine with them if I’d put the group on the cars
No, the cars belonged to people of the group, so I just asked them to move them.
Cheers Bert, this is a great help, I’ve got a big group shot coming up soon!!
Excellent execution! You have clearly a good eye for lots of details and experience. Chapeau! Also many thanks for showing the before and after photoshop-ing.
thanks Neale and Paul
Thank you for a very informative post!
Love the end result as well!
[...] Groepsfoto 70 man – hoe belichten kijk hier eens: http://bertstephani.com/2009/01/26/b…p-a-groupshot/ http://www.squeezethelime.com/video-…le-group-shot/ kan je al een eindje mee verder [...]