Small Group Shot Setup - Questions

[bauerman]

I am going to be shooting a family portrait tomorrow morning with about 11 people total - half of them are kids. Inside - probably in front of a fireplace or the Christmas Tree.....just basic tungsten lighting available.

I shoot with a 20D and with have a Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8 lens attached. I have a 550EX that will be hotshoe mounted and do have a 420EX that I can slave off this on-camera strobe.

Any ideas for setup of the people, lighting....etc........I do not have any umbrellas or light stands at this point for use. I wish that I did. In the meantime - what would be my best bet?

[jgogums]

I'd think without any modifiers your best bet would be to bounce the flash off the ceiling. This would give you a large light spread and a softer transition to shadows vs. pointing the flash directly at them and having a hard shadow line on the wall/fireplace.

If your 550 can't give you enough bounced flash power for your wide DOF (to get everyone in focus) then you could try adding the slaved 420 to the mix and bouncing that also. Try different locations with the slave and don't feel limited to bouncing off of the ceiling. Think about the direction the added light will come from and see if you can get relatively even illumination with your hotshoe mounted flash and the slave.

As for positioning the group. Watch for distortion on the edges if you are using a wide focal length. Anyone on the edges will probably look a little bigger than they actually are. Choose the people in these position wisely or else you may get one of these faces .:mad:

At f/5.6, 35mm and 10 feet from group your DOF will be about 5.75 feet. If you are trying to get ambient light in the exposure (ie. Christmas tree lights, fire, lamps) then you may have to crank up the ISO to get a reasonable shutter speed for your chosen f-stop. Rule of thumb is focal length x crop factor = shutter speed, thus 35 x 1.6 = shutter speed around 1/50th.

Good luck...I'm sure others will post many other options!