Connor Family Final

Last weekend we were hired to take a group portrait of the Connor Family Reunion.  They are a really neat family with at least 4 generations who came together from at least 4 different states.  They were a fun loving bunch and thankfully were extremely patient with us getting everything setup.

We knew there’d be 50+ people in this group, and the shoot was scheduled at 2pm, so we were originally thinking (hoping) there’d be a good spot outdoors we could use to take advantage of the natural lighting. We were looking for some open shade to give nice diffuse light. No such luck.  (There was one tree in the front of the house – to the right of the one just outside the window in the shot above – but it didn’t give enough shade to get the entire group in comfortably). And it was hot out there, so our models would have quickly wilted…   So we started looking for an indoor location, and settled on the large living room seen above.

We liked the balcony above, that let us shoot down on the group – easier to get them all in and since they all had to look up, this angle automatically eliminates any double-chins.  (In a group this big, you’ve really got a limited time span to get the shot, so anything you can do to help yourself out before hand is a big plus.) What we didn’t like about it was the ambient light levels in the room, shown here:

Ambient light levels in the room - 1/160 s @ f/5.6, ISO 640.

We needed a wide angle lens for these shots, so we were using the 10-22mm lens on the Canon 40D.  I’d have preferred to use the 5D in these conditions since it really excels at low light shots, but we don’t have a wide angle lens for the full frame camera (yet!). So we brought out the speedlights:

Adding light to get a good exposure

The three lights were placed as shown above and initial power settings were guessed at.  Took a couple test frames and tweaked the settings as needed.  This allowed us to get to the final exposure shown at the top of the post.  We started with just the two shoot-thru’s on the sides, but it still needed some extra fill, so we set up the reflecting umbrella in the middle.

After that, it was just a question of taking at least 3 frames of each group (each sub-family group wanted a picture of just them) to make sure we caught at least one frame with everyone’s eyes open in at least one of them.  Had to do a bit of Photoshop work to get the good faces all in the same picture, but it was relatively minor.  Also ran them through Nik Software’s Dfine 2.0 to deal with some noise from the elevated ISO’s.

In hindsight, we could have pumped the flash power on the three units (the highest setting on any of these was 1/8th power, I think) and used that exposure to drop the ISO.  I did walk the exposure down a few stops but started getting too much motion in the kids so needed to keep it at about 1/160 s.  I did try one or two frames at a slightly wider aperture than f/5.6, but I was paranoid about making sure everyone was in focus, and didn’t want to open up too wide, just in case.

You can check out the full slideshow of all the images from this set at the galleries page on main site.

Enjoy, and please let us know what you think!