Taking photos of groups of children - some tips and observations

Recently I had an assignment to take photos of the several school classes. The final 'product' were the standard group photos of school classes:

Although it looks simple, there are some aspects and potential challenges that require at least some attention.

The location and lighting

Choosing the right spot for a shoot is not trivial, especially when the only available location is a school playground: a lot of open space with the school building as the background. Not very exiting, I'd say. Additional problem was the full sun at this day which would guarantee harsh shadows on the faces of the children. Luckily, at the border of the playground there were some trees that gave enough shadow to cover the whole group. Shadow coming from the tree provided decent light for the shoot: diffused on one side, but bright enough to be able to shoot with the 1/100s, f/7.1 and ISO 200.

Last but not least, the trees served as a nice background for the photo. My setup looked as shown in the picture below:

The bench in the shadow was the main 'stage', while the camera was about 10-15 meters away, put on a tripod (right in the picture) The lens used was 200 mm lens, set to about 135 mm. This focal length was good enough to compress the foreground with the background a bit.

The background was not perfect though. There were still some distracting elements there (like the fence and the bright part of the building's roof. 

This was the moment of a trade off: lighting wise it was the best spot I could get, so I was pretty sure that the most important objects on the photo (children's faces) would be properly lit. The distraction I could eliminate, at least partially by careful composition and doing some post processing.

 The last aspect to take care about was the color of light. Since the shadow was given by the trees, they could cause some color casting. To prepare for it I took several pictures of the color checker placed on the spot. I use X-Rite color checker for this purpose. X-Rite software integrates well with Lightroom  and makes creation of the color profiles quite easy.

The limited time

This is almost always the case at school: tight rhythm of the day: 45 minutes lesson, 10 minutes break, next lesson. So is the time of the photoshoot. Per group I had roughly 5 minutes time: to set up the group, to take 1-2 test photos, do some reshuffling of children, cherry up some of them, calm down most of them, take the final picture. 

Interesting observation is that teachers are not of much help in such situation: they are part of the group waiting for the directions. So it is important to have a plan and be ready to play the role of a 'director' of the shoot. 

Direction and communication with the group

First of all I have pictured in my head the end result. To play safe I applied the simple principles to make the process simple: most people read visual information from left to right and from top to bottom. Another basic principle was to ensure that all the faces are good visible and not covered by other children or other obstacles. Having all this in mind the direction was straightforward: I created 2 rows, ordered taller children to step on the bench, less tall ones to stay on the ground. Then (if required) I reshuffled them to ensure that the rows visually form more or less straight line. 

Again, it is the tradeoff, balancing the certainty of the final shot, the (limited) artistic values of the photo and limited time. 

Each time I was explaining the process at the very beginning: I have noticed that this way I can have children's attention for at least couple of minutes.

To enhance communication I decided to use the trigger cable for releasing the shutter. So I was able to stay next to my camera and have direct contact with the group. It worked well, especially when I had to give some extra directions. For example, it is pointless to say to the group: "and now move 0,5 meter to the left". Instead I was making a step aside asking them to do the same. It worked well.

For the final shot I explained that I will be counting till 5 before taking the shot and was showing the number with my hand. In fact I was taking the actual shot at "3" or "4". This simple trick ensured that they all watched at me (or rather my hand) and I could catch their eyes on the picture.

Watch out the equipment

This is very important, especially when one stays on the playground. The thing is that the children start run and don't watch at the obstacles. So it is absolutely necessary to stand by the tripod and mark your spot this way. Otherwise there is a risk that they tackle the gear. This happened to me some time ago when one of the children run against the light stand with attached flashlight and an umbrella. As a result thereof I had to buy a new umbrella.

First communion session: part 2 - taking pictures

After some preparations the actual session finally took place on a sunny and windy afternoon in one of the parks in The Hague. I will not write in this post about all technical aspects of the shooting, because there are people who already did it and they did it, in my opinion, very well (Photography Life, Cliff Mautner, just to mention some of my inspiration sources). Instead I'd like to share some observations that are rather specific to the interaction with other people (especially children) during the session.

Avoid "programmed smile mode"

Children (and adults, by the way too) are nowadays trained to smile as soon as they see a camera pointing at them. Smiling is of course a very nice and desired gesture, but sometimes it takes kind of a programmed form, which makes the portrait looking not so natural. Two pictures below illustrate this.

On the first photo the girl took the 'directed' smile. Cute, but it is not her gesture. 2nd photo looks much more better because of her smile is just natural. 

How to avoid this phenomenon? I don't have enough experience to give here a generic advice, but during this session I applied a few things:

• I gave the children (and their family) some time to get familiar with the fact that I was in front of them, pointing with a big lens. After a quarter or so they paid less attention to me, giving me the chance to take natural-looking shots,
• I was joking a lot. It helped,
• During the session I gave children some simple assignments, so they could focus on something else than posing only. For example, I have asked the little brother to find a flower for her sister (more on that later).

Stick to the plan but be ready for unexpected all the time

During preparations I have assumed 5-6 different locations and several different configurations of photographed people. In any case to have enough material to create a paper album which would be appealing and interesting for the readers.
So the plan consisted of:

• Portraits of the girl (alone)
• Portraits of the girl (with her brother, mother, father),
• Family portrait (with parents and grand parents),
• Photos with sacral attributes associated with first communion

Since I had just one hour, I had to watch the time and operate sometimes rather quickly. Nevertheless taking pictures was not continuous. We moved from place to place, I discussed the ideas with participants, etc. And many interesting photos I took exactly during such break. There were moments that children start to play with each other, but also the parents didn't pay much attention to me behaving more natural:

Direct the show but let participants play

As I predicted, the participants expected from me that I would direct them during the session and tell what they have to do, how to pose and what will be the next steps. Which is fine, but on the other hand I think it is important not to 'over direct' everything, since at the end everyone wants to look natural on the photo. In this case the task was easy, since children were involved. And they don't let anybody to direct their behavior (at least not for the long time). So I was able to get some pictures expressing true emotions. For instance, I asked little brother of the girl to give her a flower. He actually liked the idea very much and long after the 'flower scene' was finished, he was bringing her other stuff as well, giving everyone a lot of fun:

Observe interactions, make use of it

During the session I have discovered that the girl likes her cousin very much. They apparently had a good time playing together. So I decided to take an additional session with those two children.  Whether they will be chosen to the album, I don't know, but to me they are my favourite shots of the session:

Organize a big portrait session - optimizing the flow

This post is a continuation of a series about shooting portraits for a school. I described briefly in one of previous articles about the general idea. In this post I am going to describe some human-related aspects of such session and give some tips on how to make it successful for the children, school staff and the photographer. To give you some context let me just summarize the challenge:

• The session takes 3 to 4 hours
• During this time 70 to 100 children gets photographed
• Each child is photographed twice: one photo is in a full-length pose, one as a close-up (depending on the situation either upper half of or head and shoulders
• Some children want to be photographed together with their brothers or sisters, school friends, etc.
• Each group is photographed as a whole together with their mentor teacher.

In short, such a day is intense and the border between intense and chaotic is thin. But it is the responsibility of a photographer to deliver the photos, so he need to ensure that the workplace remains decent during the day and such session doesn't turn into chaos. Here's an approach I have developed over several years. I am not telling it is perfect, but it works quite well.

1. Realize that you as a photographer are the director of the whole event. So think ahead about the possible scenarios and have a plan for different cases.
2. Get in touch with school staff in advance. Ask about their schedule, try to fit the session into school's rhythm. Ask for the school schedule during the day of the session. Plan the order in which the groups will attend the session.
3. Agree in advance how the teachers and parents will assist you. It is absolutely necessary to have help of the school staff or/and the parents. For a number of reasons: first, it is legally mandatory that teachers are present during any activity of a 'stranger'. Second, they are invaluable when guiding the group of children. They simply know how to do it efficiently. Third, children, especially the younger, feel more comfortable and safe when they have a trusted adult person close to them.
4. Prepare all your gear before starting shooting. Be on a location on time, way before the planned start. Keep in mind that setting up the background, lights, test shooting cost time (in my case it takes 90 minutes, because I need to iron the background).
5. After setting everything up look around and try to visualize how the children would walk (or rather run) on and around the setup. Then protect your most important parts! Put a chair, a table, anything that would stop the most active and enthusiast children from ruining into the arranged studio. I always stay in the front of setup, in the direction of the incoming group. As soon as I see them running I make some gestures to stop them and explain quickly how they should move and where to watch out. Then I keep them (together with a teacher) out of the actual scene, letting them stay or sit around the setup.
6. Be decisive. Children get quickly excited but they get bored also very fast. So it is important to start shooting immediately - just start talking to children, ask who is going to be first (for 100% there always will be at least one), put them in the marked place on the scene, explain what you are going to do (2 photos) and shoot. One, control, two - ready. Next child. Everything should take no more than several minutes.
7. Remember, you are a director. So when individual photos are ready, start to organize group photo. Depending on a group size decide about the number of rows, who will be in front, who in back (a rule of thumb is: smaller children in the front). 
8. Once the group photo is ready guide the group out of the scene. Remember again about securing your gear and the setup.
9. Control the setup in between the groups. Is the background still ok? Are all the lights operational? Do the assistants know how it works and how to proceed?
10. Be flexible. Sometimes you need to spend a bit more time with a child; either he/she is shy or requires some more attention during posing (like children wearing glasses). In this situation communicate to a teacher or parents so they know what is going on.
11. Ask the teacher or parent in case there is some intervention required during posing. Like fixing the hairs, clothing, etc. Again, it is about building the trust. Children trust their teachers and parents, not you. I always discuss this question in advance and ask assistants for help in such cases.
12. Have a couple of jokes ready. Use them when a child or group needs to be cheered up.

Shooting a stage event (or boost the light conditions if you can)

Today's post is about photographing a dancing performance conducted by children on a school stage.

The event I was shooting was a local celebration of the Polish Presidency of the European Union Council and the show was prepared by the dance group "Children of Europe". 

Taking photo of such event is quite challenging because of a combination of factors: there is a lot of movement on the stage (dancing), the lighting on the stage is limited, the required depth of field is relatively wide (because there is a group of 10-20 dancers, moving all over the stage and you want to capture all of them). The photo below illustrates my point.

Dancing on stage requiring wide depth of field

Ideally I wanted to have the persons on a first plane captured with the same quality as the ones in the background. So the aperture shouldn't be opened too wide (in the above case it was f/5.6, which worked quite well). Then the lighting. The typical options that I started with didn't offer enough:

• Don't use flash. With the available stage lighting to be able to capture children during movement  and having reasonable shutter speeds, I'd need to use ISO of 3200. Not an option, since my D80 produces way too much noise with such high ISO values
• Use the on-camera flash. It would work for the first plane, sure. But even with the powerful SB-900 it is impossible to cover the whole stage with light of good quality. The children on the background wouldn't be properly exposed.

So I needed some "lighting boost". And in this case I had some luck (yes, sometimes one needs just that). The ceiling above the stage was white and it was not too high. The photo from the rehearsal illustrates it:

Relatively low, white ceiling above the stage gave some lighting opportunities

Having the white ceiling opened a great opportunity to me: I was able to create a huge light source (nearly as big as the ceiling above the stage) projecting the light on the whole staging area. And taking photos like this one:

The lighting setup used for creating these light conditions is shown on the sketch below (view from the top):

The speedlights pointing the to the ceiling were put on the Lastolite all-in-oneumbrella stands. I had to put them quite high (about 220 cm) for two reasons: first, you don't want the flashes to be disturbing for the audience and the artists. And the second, I wanted to reduce the distance between the light source and the ceiling as much as possible to reduce light power loss. 

The primary purpose of SB-900 on the camera was to be used as a master flash of the created iTTL setup. I could use the built-in flash for this purpose as well, but I wanted to be on a safe side and use the power (and the coverage) of the SB-900 to trigger the remote flashes. And I wanted to have the decent light source with me while moving around the stage during the concert just in case the setup would not work.

Fine tuning of the setup took me about 20 minutes. A few consideration points:

• The speedlights on the stand should be pointed and zoomed to cover as much of the ceiling as possible. This is a bit trial and error process: I made a setup by imaging a way will travel, take a photo, check the result, adapt the setup. For example I started with the diffuser domes, but took it off since they didn't contribute to the light quality, but were reducing the light power slightly
• Decide where I would be shooting most during the performance and point the iTTL sensors of the remote speedlights in this direction. It increases stability of the setup tremendously.
• I needed to crank up the power of the remote flashes to the maximum values. Which in turn drained the batteries quite quickly. So remember to have the spare set in your pocket when working with such setup.
• The photos were slightly underexposed (in most cases by 1 EV). even with the maximum power of the speedlight flashes. This however was easy to correct in the post processing.

If one asks why one of the remote speedlights was SB-600 while another SB-900, the answer is simple: this is the equipment that I had with me.

As one can guess the described setup is not universal: there is not always a white ceiling above the stage, not every time one would have the opportunity to put his own equipment in the stage neighbourhood, the performance director will not always allow to take the photos. But if one has the freedom I had this approach is worth trying.