Balance

Seems like this whole gig is a balancing act.  I suppose everything in life is about trade-offs.  So there are 300 people in line to get a photo.  I want to take the best possible photo of each family.  But to say that time is limited is an understatement.  I figured if I could keep each family to an average of only 1 minute, I could finish before the event was over.  In practice, I think the average was less than that.  All in all, I am happy with the photos.  That is not to say they are all perfect in my opinion.

So many families walked in, we got them posed, they smiled, one shot, they’re out.  We had some blinkers of course.  My trick to reduce this is to pick random times in the 1,2,3 to shoot.  Sometimes 1 . . click, sometimes 1 . . 2 . . click (I am remembering Lethal Weapon for some reason).

The balancing act happened a few times when I took the photo, was not really happy with the pose/expression/framing, but looked back to see people lined up as far as I could see and did not take another shot.  I am not posting any of the ones that I didn’t like because the families may not see a problem with them so I won’t ruin that for them (wow there’s a big assumption that someone may actually see this blog).

Vertical – Horizontal
I posted the above shot as an example of going with the flow.  When I envisioned the lighting scheme my mind was completely in vertical mode.  Daddy Daughter right.  But oh yeah, many families are Daddy Daughter Daughter Daughter (we actually have friends that were there that night with 7 daughters).  So vertical is out and I switch to horizontal and were good.  The trade-off is that you don’t get to see all the girls’ dresses but there they are with Daddy.

Hindsight Hairlights
Of course, after the fact, I see that I could have added one more light to this scheme.  The two photos below are two more favorites of mine.  Daddy has a dark coat on.  My one hairlight outlines his left shoulder well but right shoulder has disappeared.  One more hairlight at camera left would have defined that for the dark clothes.

Hindsight Posing
There was a photo (not included here) that I missed the problem completely.  Didn’t notice until I got home that Daddy’s head was floating.  We got him and his two daughter posed with the girls in front of him on either side and Daddy, with his arms around them behind.  The problem was that the whole group was facing the camera directly.  My lights were angle 45 degrees from the left and right so Daddy was in the shadows of both girls.  Arghh.  It is still a nice shot but I could have done better.

Other posing issues were that, well, I have no idea what I’m doing.  That’s an issue right.  Never done this so I was just winging it.  Didn’t know what to do with hands.  I researched a little about posing but not enough.  I found that relaxed hands worked well.  Sometimes just letting them interact without direction was great.  Like above where Daughter has Daddy’s fingers.

So I learned a lot and had fun.  Any input is welcome.  Be blessed.

~ by pbphoto on June 7, 2009.