... if anyone ever asks you to take a large family portrait, and insists you be in the photograph as well.
Difficult enough to get this many people looking at the camera at one time, let alone posing properly, when you're BEHIND the camera. Basically impossible to do it from the back row in FRONT of the camera...
This image is a composite of 7 different images. I intended it to be a composite of 2 images. In order to get the background looking how I wanted, with the lights on the trees, and with a gridded softbox aimed at the crosses, I had to take a separate, ~1 second exposure after getting the portrait images. Other than merging the background in, the reason for the rest of the images in the composite were face transplants, eye transplants, and whole body transplants.
What a nuisance! About 12 hours of editing time!
Looking back on it, I would have been much better off to take a few shots from my normal position (i.e. behind the camera), which would have made it more reasonable to get everyone looking the right way and posed properly (and catch the stray kid pulling his shirt up or fiddling with his hands). Then, at the end, transplant only myself into the final image.
Oh well, live and learn, I guess...
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