Shooting a large group

Same here Butch. Thanks again for your advice.

Today's the day! In a few hours I'm going in.....sink or swim. I ended up renting a pair of strobes from a local camera shop. They are Novatron 240's w/ power pack, stands, umbrella's and sync cord. I also have my 2 LumoPro 160's to use as fill light for the wall and behind the workstation area and I own a cheap transmitter and a few receivers which worked fine and allowed me to fire the strobes with my flashes. I just tested everything at home and it seemed to work fine, except my dog is seeing spots.

A few Noob questions:

What is the difference between bouncing the light off the umbrella and shooting through it and which way is recommended?

There are no power settings on these lights, but the power pack has has a 120/240 switch. I assume it's better to go with lower power so start at the 120 and see if it works? If it's not enough then switch to 240?

Lastly, I'm going to start at f/8, 1/160, ISO 100. Is there a priority of with respect to changing the aperture, shutter & ISO vs the light power?

Looking forward to the results.

I think I would have some fun with this too. I would do maybe for people at at time on a white back ground and composite somethinig together. Would be fun to do....

Good luck, Jon. May the Photog Gods be with you!!!

Jon, I hope your shoot went well, that the lighting worked out for you and the 'actors' cooperative. I look forward to seeing a shot or two if you care to share them.

Here's the first couple. I ended up with about 10 that I need to process further and let the owner choose from. It's going to take little time to get to them all, as I have a bunch of various shoots I'm juggling at the moment. We ended up with a few less than the 18 originally intended, which helped a bit with the space and lighting. If you see any oportunities for improvement in either the way they were shot or processed I would appreciate your comments, and thanks again to everyone who gave me suggestions going in.

The first is taken from atop a ladder as suggested, the second from eye level.

In Photoshop, copy your layer. Image > adjustments > shadows/highlights. Tweak the shadows some to lighten up the dark areas. I usually start at 59 for amount, 29 for tonal range and 300 for the radius and kind of play with it from there (these settings are dependent on the resolution of the image). Adjust opacity of layer or mask in what you want; or both. It's possible to get too carried away here and mess up skin tones, or add a lot of noise.

I'm just getting into OCF, but I think they look great. I prefer the one from the ladder, I think it looks nice cropped in like that also.

Nice job, everyone's smiling and has their eye's open. Did you end going with the shoot thru' or bounce?

Thanks guys/gals. I ended up going bounce reasoning a better light spread. Not sure if that is true, but it was my reasoning.

Here's a couple more with bdillon's shadow/highlight tweak in addition to a few of my own.

Well done.
All the lower level shots have acceptable lighting.
And better positioning of the subjects.
Only improvement, which was probably not possible because of space constraints, would have been to use a longer focal length lens.

Maybe use a gradient to darken the lower part of the image to deimphasis the legs.

lighting looks good, but you chopped off the legs of the people in the front. not a big deal but just something to note. also, the skin tones look very red in the black shirt group shot.

I agree about the red in the black shirt group.
As for the cut off legs, use a gradient filter and vignetting to minimize those extraneous elements.

Those look pretty good!

For anyone else interested:

Curtis N wrote in post #13091764
There is one rule for lighting group shots: Keep it simple. I generally use one light, with a big umbrella, directly behind and above the camera. If you make it any more complicated, you'll regret it. Off-axis lights just create shadows where you don't want them.

Hair salons have lots of mirrors. Multiple mirrors = nightmare! All the more reason to keep the lighting simple. The mirrors will bounce it around in ways you can't predict. They also create reflections. Make sure to position yourself and your light so you aren't in the picture!

Good luck!

Post #8 in: https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1099317

Thanks for the comments all. I'll play around with vignettes and gradients and see what I can come up with.