Crushing the Comfort Zone - Group Portrait

Photography has become a large part of my life, but it hasn’t yet reached a point where I can generate income from it. In order to pay the bills, I work as a front-end web developer for a digital consultancy. This year, we have again been nominated as finalists for an Agency of the Year award, which means being part of an article in a print publication. The magazine requires us to submit a corporate group portrait and owing to a recent influx of personnel we used the opportunity to create a fresh image for ourselves.

I am known in my company as the resident photographer, so when the the situation arose I was consulted for advice. After a brief discussion about the best kind of lens to use, which I urged was not the only factor to consider, it was decided that I would be in charge of taking the photo, a challenge which I eagerly accepted but not without quiet consideration.

I had never professionally or even casually shot portraits let alone group portraits, so while I was enthusiastic about the prospect of attempting a genre in which I had no experience, I knew that the company would be relying on me to produce a flattering and publishable image.

I, along with a fellow coworker, scouted out a few locations and decided on the upstairs area of a nearby bar. I noticed the stairs at the far end of a line of booths and imagined that it would offer a dynamic foundation upon which to position the two dozen people. I wanted to seize the opportunity to add a sense of depth and variety to the shot rather than just have everyone in rows. I took a few test shots to work out camera placement for a decent composition, but the biggest issue was the lighting. Apart from a fairly large glass wall that was behind and to the right of the camera, which doesn’t provide as much light as expected since the sun was lighting the opposite side of the building, there were only dim down-lights scattered around the area. Without any additional lights, I had to boost the ISO to at least 6400 to get a correct exposure, which was not going to be acceptable. Aside from the horrendous amount of noise, the direction of the light was not going to work.

Handheld test shot to establish the composition.

Fortunately enough, I am a member of a photography group for Fujifilm users, so lacking the belief that I would be able to produce a suitable photo, I presented the test photo and asked for advice. Among some helpful tips from the group, one of the members just happened to be the owner of Camera Electronic - a local retailer - and graciously offered me the use of some lighting equipment at no cost. Of course I accepted with gratitude and started the process of coordinating the acquisition of the gear. It’s probably worth mentioning that this all happened on a Friday and we scheduled the shoot for the following Monday.

After a few phone calls I went down to the store on Sunday to pick up the equipment, a pair of Profoto B1X’s with accompanying stands and umbrellas, which they happily offered to teach me how to use. Although I had never used lights before, I had watched numerous videos about them and had also recently attended a lighting workshop run by the same store. They proved to be incredibly simple to use and so it was just a matter or figuring out what was right for the location.

As the shoot was the next day, I phoned and asked if I could come in and experiment with the lights, but there was a private function on. So instead I took the gear to my office which was just down the road and started trying out different things such as setting the light to two different channels so their power could be controlled individually.

On the day of the shoot, as our time was precious, I had only half an hour to prepare everything so that when everyone arrived all I had to do was placement and start shooting. I set my tripod down roughly where I was standing for the test shot and started fine-tuning the composition. I decided quite early that my 18-55mm kit lens was just a bit too zoomed in and I couldn’t move the camera any further back as I was right up against a sofa on a balcony, so I switched to my 14mm prime lens. I would have preferred to use a longer focal length as it would reduce the difference in size of subjects on the stairs and behind the railing, but in the circumstances it was more important to capture everyone with some breathing room around the edges for cropping.

Then came the matter of the lights. As shown in the test shot, the light coming in from the right wasn’t terrible, but I was concerned that it would cast shadows on people standing next to each other and get almost completely blocked from reaching the people sitting on the sofa. Therefore it made sense to me to position the light to the left of the camera to fill in the opposite side, but it couldn’t be too intense that everyone looked flat and the moody atmosphere of the location would be lost. So I placed one light about two metres to the left of the camera with a large white umbrella extended quite high up so that it would still produce some flattering shadows. I took dozens of test shots, constantly adjusting my ISO and the light’s power setting until I got an exposure that was balanced. I ended up at ISO 1600 with a power level of about 3.0.

I had originally thought I would need to shoot at about f/8 to get enough depth of field to keep everyone in focus, but after using some calculators I determined that at that distance I could still go all the way up to f/2.8, which gave me a lot more leeway to increase the shutter speed (which had to be on 1/180 for the lights) and keep the ISO fairly low. If I went down to ISO 200, the lights would have had to be bumped up three stops, and the resulting light from that direction was too intense.

I was fairly happy with the key light, but I had another at my disposal. I decided to set it up just to the right of the camera facing upwards without any modifiers. As the ceiling was dark, the bounced light had a subtle effect, but I think it made a significant difference by just adding a little bit of light to the tops of the heads so they didn’t get lost in the dark background.

So the time came and everyone arrived on schedule - as an agency it’s costly for all of us to be out of the office at the same time, so we couldn’t waste any time. I had already envisioned roughly where I would place everyone, factoring in heights and significance in the company - I wasn’t going to hide our co-founders at the back - but you can never really be completely prepared until you see what it actually looks like with everyone in place. In a portrait shoot, it is up to the photographer to tell the model where to stand and what to do - doing this for two dozen people demands a lot of confidence and communication. I had to start shepherding people with my voice, trying to create a balanced arrangement of heads.

Of course, I had to be in the shot as well, so once everyone was in position the last piece of the puzzle was to start up the Fujifilm app on my phone and start remote shooting. This allowed me to slot myself in at the back and stealthily started tapping away at the shutter button. The final challenge was making sure everyone was actually looking at the camera with a pleasant expression, so I had to provoke some laughter by making nonsensical requests. I knew I had to keep taking exposures because you’ll never know what could ruin a shot. We were all having a good time, but it also meant people kept looking at each other, so at one point I simply shouted “Alright, everyone look at the camera” and took the shot. I believe this was the shot I came away with.

Straight-out-of-camera JPEG of chosen exposure.

This shot looks very dark, but the RAW file contained enough data that I could recover all of the shadows. It’s generally a good idea to underexpose than to overexpose as you can more effectively recover shadows than highlights. I also noticed a few of the lights fixtures were very close to some of our heads and were just distracting, so I simply healed them out.

Final image after editing. Fujifilm X-T20 with XF14mmF2.8 - f/2.8, ISO 1600, 1/180 s.

Overall I was very impressed with the final image, as were my coworkers. If I were to attempt it again, and I had more time to prepare, I would try to position the camera such that the exit sign wasn’t in the frame (it was quite difficult to heal out) and I would pay a bit more attention to how people were standing to keep the heads more evenly spread out.

However, I’m mostly proud of offering to take on this project without having any real experience in this genre. As photographers I feel we should always be learning and trying out different things, even if it’s not something you normally do or have any interest in.

Thanks for reading.