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:

First communion session: part 1. The preparations.

Couple of weeks ago I was flattered by a request of my acquaintance who asked me to take 'a few' pictures of her daughter, who would receive her first communion these days. The euphoria however was diminished quite quickly, as soon as I realized how serious the assignment actually would be. First communion in the catholic church is one of the most important sacraments and in some countries (like Poland) it is a big celebration for a child and his/her family. So I need to do a good job as photographer.
Another issue for me is that I am not so acquainted with all the nuances behind this ceremony and the day of communion. Sure, it takes place in church, children are dressed nice and tidy, but what are the sacral attributes used nowadays during the ceremony? What is important for parents?
Finally I took the request, but I knew that I had to make quite some preparations and precautions to make the session a success.

Talk to parents, discuss the expectations

This is actually most important part of the preparation. I have talked to the mother several times to discuss the time of shooting, expectations (of her and of mine), to share initial ideas.

I believe it helps both sides. Her, because she can do some preparations and me because I can shape the expectations to some extent and check whether my ideas would match hers.

For example, I discussed already my initial plan of the session:

- Duration of 1 hour,

- Start at 7:00 p.m.

- Four parts: portraits of a girl, session with parents, session with the rest of family, session with sacral attributes.

Get inspired - look at others' work

However it may sound lame (we photographers are creative people, aren't we?) looking at the portfolios of people making money by taking photos helped me a lot. As I stated already, in Poland the first communion is a big thing, hence big business. So there was enough blogs and websites to go through and see what people actually sell to their customers. Next to getting some ideas it is good to check what are the trends and what the customers perceive as appealing.

Other quite good source of good photos was 500px.com.

And for gathering the shots that were interesting to me I have used a Pinterest page.

Find the patterns, learn from them

Knowing what the event is about and how people act during such day (e.g. how are they dressed) makes possible to start searching for something similar and again learn from those experiences. To me first communion event resembles in many aspects the wedding ceremony:

- there is a strong emphasize on a main person being dressed like little bride,

- there is a compulsory shooting part involving the family (parents, grandparents, pete parents, etc.),

Obviously there are differences as well. Most apparently, the attention is directed to a child most of the time.

So the pattern to look for would be something between wedding photography and children and family portraiture.

So it is worth some exploration of techniques that can be used in such situations. Therefore I use materials on kelbytraining.com  and discussion forums on nikonians.org. Kelbytraining is a collection of video courses showing different kinds of techniques, tricks and tips used by different (very good) photographers. It is not free but it is worth money you spent in my opinion.

Choose and scout the location

Since there will be several people involved, there should be kind of direction given to them during the session. And the director will be in this case, well, me. So having a location explored a bit in advance helps. I want to avoid the moments of hesitation where nobody knows what to do next and where to walk. For sure those moments will probably come (I don't want and cannot plan everything), but I would like to minimize them and let them, especially in the beginning of the shooting.

Get acquainted with the people being photographed

Here I was lucky twice: I know the girl and her parents and I was able to see some photos of the family on Facebook. This gave my basic idea (or sometimes a couple of questions) about the personalities of people. For example I noticed that the little brother of a girl was not present on the photos published. Doesn't he like to be photographed? Or had just not a good day? After some talk to the mother I know that he was just not in the mood on this day but he loves to pose for the photos. Another example: I saw that the grandfather of the girl looks very seriously on all pictures. So it will be a challenge to cheer him up a bit during the session. Whether I will succeed I don't know, but at least I am aware of the challenge.

Playing with the rim light

During this year's portrait session I was using a rim light for the first time. I have used a self-made rectangular softbox equipped with the flashlight as a light source. My idea was to create a contour line along one side of the face and the shoulders of the model.
To make the finetuning easier other light sources were switched off. So I could see the result of this particular light only.
It turned out that proper placement of the softbox relative to a model was the most challenging task. First attempt was to just put a light source right to the model (picture left):

The effect is not fully as I wanted. Obviously, the right part of the model's body is lit, but the contour line along her body is actually not visible. The next attempt was to move the light source a little behind the model, projecting the light slightly from her back:

This is much more satisfactory. The line along model's right arm and head is more visible. Sure I lost some light on her face, but it would be compensated by the other light sources.

The final position of the rim light source became eventually like that:

School portrets season is over - learnings and looking forward

The shooting of portraits for the Polish school in The Hague for 2012 is finished. Today I sent last photos for printing. As each year I try to put a new challenge on the area of photography and to experiment with something new. After all, it should be fun for everyone, including a volunteer photographer.

So this year I was using 3 light sources for the first time, building a classical setup: base light in front of the subject, left or right, background lighting to lit the background and the rim light coming from the  side, slightly behind the subject:

The light sources I have used for the setup were as follows:

- Base light (A) Lastolite's EzyBox Hotshoe 76x76cm powered with SB-900 in iTTL mode

- Background light (B): SB-600 placed on a boom arm behind a Lastolite's Tri grip diffuser. SB-600 set in manual mode on 1/4 of maximum power.

- Rim light (C): self-made 30x100 cm softbox with SB-900 set in iTTL mode.

The setup was controlled by the SB-910 flash placed on the camera.

The light setup was partially dictated by the background:

It felt more naturally to put the background light to the right letting the light travel along the lines formed by the orange clouds. So is the main light was placed also left to the photographed subject.

Before shooting I needed to decide whether to use a laptop and shoot in tethered mode or not. Finally I decided not to do so, mainly due to the number of children and the expected crowd and hectic during the session.

So what were the challenges this year? Here the list of most important ones:

1. Place the rim light efficiently to create the desired result,

2. Determine the limits of iTTL system and learn how to use it in such situations,

3. Learn how to deal with iTTL when there is no line of sight between the master flash and the remote units (and not ruin your budget),

4. Streamline the workflow during the session and during the post-processing efficiently so it doesn't take ages to come to the photos.

5. Fine tune the light setup to let children shine on a portrait (some information about it in my previous post)

6. Place the larger groups in front of the background of a limited size.

In coming posts I will take each challenge one by one and describe what I did to overcome it.

Shooting a multi-portrait session in tethered mode - the impressions

Today I was shooting another multi-portrait session of several dozens of children (from age 0.6 to 6-7).
The setup I used was quite similar to the one I used earlier and described here. For today's session I decided to introduce a new element: a laptop connected to the camera, so I was able shoot in so-called tethered mode.
This way of shooting is adviced by a lot recognized studio photographers. Obviously it gives one clear advantage, one can judge the quality of a picture taken much better than on camera LCD. But I found out that there more advantages. More on that later, now some technical stuff.

Iteration one:
Tethered mode in Lightroom is not supported for Nikon D80. So in the first approach I have installed an "intermediate" application called Camera Control from DYIPhotoBits. It's free and it recognizes my Nikon D80, so the rest was easy: I configured the destination directory of Camera Control as a directory to be monitored by Ligthroom (In Lightroom choose File->Auto Import->Auto Import Settings... and then File->Enable Auto Import to start monitoring).
Then connect the camera via USB to the laptop (don't forget to set the USB port in your camera to the PTP mode). From now on, whenever a picture is taken, it gets saved by Camera Control, recognized by Lightroom and imported to the Lightroom catalog. There is one drawback of this approach: the latency time between shooting and getting a picture in Lightroom. So it was working, but is was not smooth (in my case it took 10-11 seconds from the shot to the file available in Lightroom for preview. Go to iteration 2


Iteration two:
The Camera Control Pro from Nikon is the application that was tested as second. For Nikon 80 version 2.0 didn't work, so after installation the immediate update to 2.8 was required. Luckily the trial version works for 30 days, so I could use it for the session. The application performance was a way better comparing to the solution from iteration one (the time from shutter release to having image available on the laptop was 2-3 sec). So this was chosen as a solution for the session

Advantages of tethered mode
Indeed, looking at a photo on a 15'' screen enables much better quality control than LCD. But there is more, much more. It gives you a possibility to interact nicely with the customer (in this case parents of the photographed children). And that is win-win situation: in my case parents could easily pick up the photos they liked, I could listen to their comments and learn what they actually like. Plus, I was able to take notes about extra wishes (like required number of prints) just in place.

Learnings and practical tips:

1. Tethered mode is a way to go for studio sessions. I am fully convinced.
2. Remember to secure the USB cable, especially in presence of small children. They really don't care about your stuff. So I fastened 30-40 cm of the cable to the floor with gaffer tape, so the chance of suddenly pulling it from the laptop (or dropping the laptop on the groud) by accidental stumble was minimized
3. I was using 5m long USB cable which was enough and gave enough flexibility. 

Shoot portraits of 100 children in 3 hours (and get decent results)

It is becoming a tradition that around Xmas and new year a quite big photo event is organized at the school where my wife teaches. The idea is to take a 'Christmas-like' portrait of each child in the school and offer it to sell just before Chrristmas so the parents and grand parents have something memorable (next to the other gifts).
Each year it is quite extensive photo session, since there are 100+ children, each child is photographed twice (the whole silhouette, and a shoulder portrait), then there are always group photos: with best friend, with the whole class, with the group of buddies, etc.

This entry is not about shooting portaits. There are dozens of places where it is already described (like here).
What is not said very often though are the little details around the session that can save you a lot of time if applied. And the opposite applies as well: if forgotten, a lot of extra work needs to be done during and after the shooting.

Over the years I have established kind of a 'logistic workflow' ensuring that the session goes smooth and the children get their photos a week or 1 1/2 week after the session. Here are some things that work good for me:

• Make appointment in advance. Inform the teachers about the event. Kindly ask for cooperation during the event
• Plan the whole event. Ask for the day schedule in advance. You want to shot all the children being at school this specific day. Look at the schedule and check if it is possible, and how to order the classes.
• Work with small groups. Try to avoid the situation when 20+ 7-years old boys and girls are running around (and sometimes across) the shooting setup. See also next bullet.
• Ask for the assistance of some staff or parents. Believe me having 2 other adults that children are familiar with is priceless. They organize smooth flow of the groups, keep an eye on the group waiting for the shoot and they can assist immediatelly in case something unexpected happens.
• Have a feminine assistant on location. For one important reason: women pay a lot more attention on the small details with respect to children hair, clothing and general look. And they can make 'last minute' small adjustments in a way that children accept it and feel comfortable.
• Play safe with your setup. While it is tempting to start experimenting with your beautiful models (as children of all ages are), remember that there are 100 waiting for their shot. So what I use mostly is a simple lighting setup with a softbox at the front of a model and one to enlight the background or to create separation between a model and the background. Something like this:

• Take a steam iron with you (no kidding). It happened to me that after unfolding the background and putting it on the stand there were creases going right through the background scene. Sure, you can remove them in postprocessing but remember: You'll have to postprocess 200+ photos. Believe me, after 10 of them it is not fun anymore. Ironing of the background will cost you 15-20 minutes.
• Take a big, white sheet with you. When put on the window it can soften harsh light (you never know) and form a nice, additional light source.
• Talk to children. Some of them seem to be born models. But some need just a little encouragement. 
• Ask children to bring their favorite toys. While not always necessary, sometimes it enriches the scene and makes children looking more natural.

This year after first shooting session one of the parents invited me to her school to make some photos at their place. Apparently she liked the photos. Which is very nice.