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.

My humble attempt to product photography

Last couple of weeks I was not very busy with photography. Instead I was doing some renovation works in my house. But at the end I thought it would be fun to take a good shot of the result of my activities. My 'product' are the stairs in my living room.
First of all one can ask: are stairs a good item for product photography excercise? Believe me, after couple of weekends spent on sanding, milling, painting, drilling, all done with your own hands - you want to show off! So for me it is a fantastic item. Here one of the final shots:

To get there I applied the process described later in this post.

Setting up the scene

First I wanted to choose 2-3 compositions to work with and to enhance these scenes during the session. In my opinion a good product shot should reveal all most important features of the product, showing the material it is made from, its shape, texture, etc. On the other hand it should attract viewer's attention and make the product appear attractively. After playing around with my camera I finally chosen three compositions to work further with:

Scene 1

Scene 2 

Scene 3

 The three pictures show different aspects of the 'product'. The first shows a generic form and a little bit of positioning of the stairs. Second shows the slope as seen from top. Third is a view showing some details of the construction.
All three pictures were takes as the 'pre visualisation' of the actual shots. The composition of all of them needs to be refined.
Second important aspect is the light to be used.

Lighting

The light used for pre visualisation photos was just ambient light, in the middle of the day. Nothing spectacular, causing the images (especially the first one) looking flat. I wanted to create the situation where the light source would cast the harsh shadows on the wall behind the stairs, making the first image looking less flat and making the background more interesting.

To achieve that I have put a SB-900 strobe on the stand, left to the picture and increase the zoom to focus the light a bit. It would give me enough harshness of the cast shadows.

Another aspect was the colour of the main light.

From the beginning I wanted to emphasize the fact that new staircases are made out of wood. One of the most forthcoming associations with wood is warmth: wood is perceived warm when making physical contact with it, it is used to produce warmth, its colours are also warm. To strenghten this association I decided to use warm light for all the shots. I have put a CTO gel on the strobes I have used. 

So the first picture was enhanced by using the light left to the camera from the SB-900 strobe, positioned on the light stand. The strobe was about the 2m height from the ground, pointing the stairs. Zoom of the flash was set to 70mm, Light intensity in manual mode to 1/4th of maximum power:

Comparing to the initial picture I took it with slightly lower angle of view, mainly to show some more floor on the foreground. 

Moving on

Next shots show the different aspects of the stairs. First the shot from top, showing the slope of the stairs:

Comparing to the first version I have used slightly different angle of view, letting the stairs be positioned diagonally on the frame. I simply liked this composition more than the initial version.

Scene number 3:

This one deviates most from the initial concept. First of all it shows the whole construction instead of the only part of it. Again, I included some part of the floor on the foreground. In this case to create leading lines and emphasize the perspective.

This picture required also a special treatment with respect to lighting. To ensure that the top part of the stairs is properly exposed, I put 2nd strobe (SB-900) on top of the stairs and difussed the light by a white shoot-through umbrella. Of course, the 2nd strobe was equipped with the CTO gel as well.

The human aspect

I do believe that adding people to the scene can make the picture much more interesting. For this assigment I have also tried to do this trick, showing the main puprose of the stairs:

To remember in the future:

1. Work with few scenes keeping in mind how to emphasize product's feature in the best way
2. Ensure that the product is absolutely clean. I was not paying much attention to this and in case of the 2nd photo (stairs seen from the top) I had to do quite some spot removal in Photoshop