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.

 

Students meet an interesting person

I have been asked by my wife to take a couple of photos at a school she works. There was a meeting organized between a group of students and their parents (about 60 in total) and so-called 'ineteresting person' who were going to tell about last 20 years of democratic changes in Poland.
The basic idea was to take the pictures for a school chronicle (of course) and to create a kind of album for the speaker and hand it over to him as a gift.
First part of an assignment is actually not a big deal - I used to do it many times before.
The photos for an album is a different story. I knew I wouldn't have a chance to take any decent portret photo of the person, neither get any time for one-to-one interaction: his time was very limited, he is in advanced age and it was pretty sure that very soon after the meeting he'll leave. So what I took during the meeting would be the material for an album. That's it.
According to the motto: "Preparation is half of work" I visited the location two hours before the actual event. There would be a small reception before the meeting (with a coffee, cake, etc.) - which was a good news; this creates extra opportunities for interesting photos.
Bad news was the setup of the meeting place:

Crowded audience, a table of the speaker placed in the corner with the speaker back to the window and a lot of glass behind a place where the speaker was going to sit.
Two things came to my mind immediatelly:
- there should be an extra light source out of the camera and not being reflected by the glass wall and put in the front of the speaker,
- there must be a possibility for taking shots from several different angles.
So I've asked the for a possibility of re-arranging the audience sitting places to create some movement opportunities. Then placed and secured an extra light source (SB-600 at the height of about 2 m pointing towards the speaker:

This setup was a good starting point (at least creating enough various possibilities of shooting).

Then the session started. Some interesting (in my opinion) photos have been taken:

One final word about the equipment:

I have used two flashes: one SB-900 attached to the camera (Nikon D-80) and one SB-600 placed on the stand. It gave me enough flexibility. I have learned however that when the audience is really quiet, zooming motor of the SB-900 is making a lot of noise, causing some disctraction. So be careful in the future and consider not using zoom in such situations.

Summary:

- Learned to prepare some "movement space" to be able to shoot from different angles,

- Extra light even from a "typical" angle of 45 degrees can make your photos a way more interesting

- Zoom motor of SB-900 in a quiet room can create a lot of undesired distraction.

Do's:
- Inspect the place in advance, try to adapt it for your needs,
- Talk to the organizers, learn the agenda of the event
- Take different positions during shooting. It enhance the final results and increases chances of a good result

Don's:
- Get surprised by your equipment by discovering a new "feature" during a session