wonkie

the group will be 30 adults then adding 45 children in another. I will be shooting with Nikon D7000 & 50mm 1.4, I will be on a step ladder to get a bit higher. the steps are deep so I can do two rows on each step and squeeze kids in everywhere. This picture is taken at 6pm which is when I will be shooting (the settings are f10 @ 1/80 ISO 500 on a tripod), I only have one sb600 flash which is what I used in this photo and shot from the Camera. My question is??? Should I get another flash and put them on both sides, is this flash going to make a difference. I am afraid that it may be too dark without anything.

F10 1/80 ISO 500

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

The problem with the flash is that there will be some falloff of light, so the back rows will be darker than the front rows. It looks like the whole area is in the shade, so it's probably better to just use the available light. If the light is too flat, you can increase the contrast in post. You need to take as many exposures as the people will sit still for, and even then there's a chance you won't get everyone with their eyes open and a decent expression. But with the camera on a tripod, you should be able to switch heads from another exposure if necessary to get a good shot of everyone.

G Brown Loc: Sunny Bognor Regis West Sussex UK

Can you get closer and do a portrait 3 shot panorama
or a landscape 4 shot pano. If you overlap well most stitching programmes will match and put it together into one big picture. PSE8 does so the later ones will too. If you use a tripod then the image shouldn't need much cropping.
If you are closer you could use a lower f stop and make use of that 1.4's light gathering capabilities. It won't work with flash though as the refresh time means folks will probably move too much.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

If you got closer and used a lower f stop, you likely wouldn't get all the rows in focus.

wonkie

Thank you, I guess I won't use a flash. I thought it would help brighten things up but if it will make it worse I will just do it without. I thought about doing a pano, good idea. I also have my kit lens, would it be better to use it at about 30mm to get a bit closer?

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

The closer you get, the larger the people in front will appear compared to the people in back. I would get further away with a longer lens. As for the pano, with that many steps, you shouldn't need to use a pano format, you should be able to fill an 8x10 format without too much space top and bottom.

wonkie

thank you John, so do you think the 50mm will be good or something else would work better

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

A 50mm would probably work fine. I would take whatever lenses I had and check out the view at the scene. The further back you are, the more equal the head sizes will be, but also the further back, the higher ladder you might need to see everyone's faces. Also, get people to overlap their bodies a little, so you can get them as close together as possible to maximize the head sizes.

Bobbee

While you are doing all this shooting see if you can get them to hold still like a statue for about 4-5 seconds and trip off a bracketed shot. Then merge them and don't let HDR funk out the picture. You may get exposure adjustments where they need it. Mayeb try this shot in the middel after people have selltled down and before they want to kill you for making them sit so long on COLD stone.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: for pano with a longer lens. As far as getting people to have their eyes open and smiling, try the following tip. Once you have everyone settled, tell them that you are going to have them all close their eyes, and on the count of three they are to open them. This works 98% of the time for me.

chaprick

One thing I have done with a large group is a triangle pose. Start at the bottom with one or two people then add two or three people to each row going up. This forms a triangle group. I then stand on a ladder about 6 to 8 feet up so I am not shooting up at the group (the works well with rectangular pose also). I think available light would be fine but I would bracket some shots also. I would shoot shutter priority at about 1/60 and ISO 400 then let the camera bracket 1 and 2 stops over and under. Just for experience, why not go ahead and shoot a flash shot or two also. I think your 50mm lens choice is fine.

Audioguy Loc: Pocono Mts. PA

It seems like your lighting is fairly even and you should be able to get adequate DOF with a 50mm perspective. I think flash would be too complex to insure proper even exposure with multiple units and probably not necessary.
I like the idea of using a normal perspective lens as you have chosen and increase contrast as necessary in post production. Moving closer will increase distortion of perspective and panning complicates the shot unnecessarily.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

My experience with this situation is that natural light is the way to go as well - unless you rent a pair of high-powered Paul C. Buff 3200ws White Lighting monolights, a couple of 14' Avenger lightstands, and a couple of 6' or 7' reflector umbrellas from Westcott, Lastolite or ProFoto. Don't forget to bring enough sandbags to hold these puppies down.

As far as lens choice, shooting with a 50mm on a crop sensor will give you a similar field of view as a 75mm on full frame, and you will have a little more depth of field provided you move back enough. The problem is that with a single frame exposure, your image quality will not be quite as good as if you did a pano. Even a two frame pano will be an improvement with at least 50% more pixels used to capture the scene. Better yet, as has been suggested above - a portrait orientation pano, with 3 frames, would give you 2x more pixels than a single shot. Pano stitching is easy to do in Photoshop or tools like PTGui (which is a free pano stitching app that gives you more conotrol over anchor points and perspective adjustments).

Bobbee

A variation on this was to create little triangles within the group. Less symetrical and gives you slight groupings.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

You have 11 levels available including in front of the first and behind the top wall and at most 75 people. That is 7 per row. Not that I am suggesting you do that. I am just saying that you have a lot of space to work with so you probably will not need to stack them 2 to a row. You can do the step ladder, but usually that is needed when you don’t have such nice differences in the levels of the platforms. You might get a more interesting shot by shooting up and at an angle (not directly in front of the group).

6:00 pm this time of year should provide plenty of light. Of course THERE ARE APPS that will show you the sun conditions and angles for your location. Can’t think of the name of any right now, but they are out there.