Best way to expose this picture?

How to expose. I am going to setup a picture. There is a park overlook near me that we used for a family picture years ago. My cousins asked me to take a picture there also. I am going to be the shooter this time
Setup will be sort of under a pergola. Long couple hundred feet overlook over a small canyon. So they will be sitting in shade. I am going to expose for the sunny area behind them in the canyon with trees. They will be dark of course. I am going to bring my 580EXII with an umbrella. Here are the questions.
Should I reflect into the umbrella for better spread? I think this will give best lighting over 5-8 people. Or shoot through the umbrella? I will have an external light meter.
Should I have the exposure on the flash equal the background?
Say backround is f8 @ 1/200 at iso 100. Should I have flash expose on them at same setting?

I know I have flash sync to worry about if it is overly sunny. I am really good about using on camera flash and using flash compensation on the camera. I think the umbrella will give me better spread? Or am I just making it WAY TO COMPLICATED?

The tiny font size you used makes it extremely difficult for a lot of us older folks to read it. NOT using anything but the standard font for the forum would be beneficial for us.

You may need ten times the light that your Speedlite is capable of, depending on the distance between the light and the subjects. Scrap the idea of the umbrella (in either mode) unless there will be a very short distance between the light and the subjects.

TIP:
You may very well find that, if you have the camera very close to the subjects, the background elements of the scene could be much smaller in your image than you hoped for. You can control the perspective (relative size of elements at different distances from the camera) by where you place the camera. The following section is taken directly from a tutorial that I wrote on the subject of perspective, and a link to the whole tutorial is below that.


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Here's a simple example of how perspective control can work for you:

Let's assume that you are taking a photo of some friends in a scene that has mountains in the background. You stand 20 feet from the people and view the scene. A 50mm lens will let you fill the frame with the group of people and some of the background quite nicely, so you take a shot. Then you realize that the mountains are rather small in the background.

Back up to to 40 feet (twice the distance) from the group of people and view the scene, you will see that the mountains are now larger relative to the people - twice the size they were before, in fact. However, the people are smaller in your viewfinder. You now need a 100mm lens to keep the people the same size as in the first image, but the mountains now appear twice the size that they were in the first shot.

Why is this? It's because the additional twenty feet that you put between yourself and the people is insignificant relative to the fifteen miles between your viewing spot and the mountains.
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Please read our "sticky" (found in the General Photography Talk forum) tutorial titled Perspective Control in Images - Focal Length or Distance?.

On the exposure question...I would tend to try to make the background just a slight bit darker than normal while giving the people the proper exposure (for example, people at 0EV while background scene is -0.66EV in relative brightness), so that the eye is drawn to the people while at the same time the mind sees the context of the location. The challenge is doing this in bright sunlight and using a flash that has sufficient power to reach the people! And that issue is not made any better by use of a reflective or shoot thru umbrella.

Thanks for the information! I had a decent understanding of this. Good point about slightly underexposing the backround. The guy who did our picture a couple years had no clue. He was a "pro" per my mom. He tried to photoshop the backround to bring the sky out. Pathetic attempt. Even my measly skills back then would have done better. hahaha. I think I am giong to have to use my 17-55 lens as my 70-200 is to long for the scene. And the backround is not that importatn. I like the brickwork in the pergola. I just don't want a blown out white sky. I have some studio strobes that can easily overpower the sun. Just don't want to lug these things out. And no power source. Just have to play around with it some. Worse comes to worse. Just put flash on camera to draw some info out of the shadows. Bounce it up a little. Maybe stofen filter on it. Or the little white card that is in teh flash itself.

bphillips330 wrote in post #12837441
.... Just put flash on camera to draw some info out of the shadows. Bounce it up a little. Maybe stofen filter on it. Or the little white card that is in teh flash itself.

I don't think you'll want to bounce the light or use a 'tupperware' diffuser or anything other than a straight flash. You'll probably need every photon it can generate on the subjects, so you don't want to redirect any out into useless space.

SkipD wrote in post #12837893
I don't think you'll want to bounce the light or use a 'tupperware' diffuser or anything other than a straight flash. You'll probably need every photon it can generate on the subjects, so you don't want to redirect any out into useless space.

^^^

The tupperware does virtually nothing to soften any shadows created by the flash, it only diminishes the intensity of light sent into the shade of the pergola.