Formal Group Photo: Burlington Public Library Board of Trustees

Here's a group photo I was hired to take for the Burlington Public Library's Board of Trustees. In cases like this, I don't want to waste too much of their time fiddling with lights. It was a Thursday evening and  everyone just wants to git-er-done and go home. But I hate the look of on-camera flash--it makes photos look so flat and amateurish. 

The Setup:

Before I had the Trustees come over, I set up one 3 x 4 ft. softbox, up high and angled down, on a stand positioned camera left . Then I adjusted the power of the Speedotron head and softbox position to give me an f/8 (@ISO 200) reading on my light meter evenly across the scene.  Why f/8? I wanted enough depth of field to keep both rows of people in focus, but blur the stack of books in the background. I made an informed guess that f/8 would do it. Maybe f/5.6 would have been better, actually. The books are still a little distracting. To capture some ambient light, I set the shutter speed to 1/30 sec. Even at that slow shutter, the people weren't going to have motion blur. They are frozen by the strobe.

The actual shooting went really quickly. Once they got on the set, I arranged them to match their heights and took maybe a dozen shots. After that, they went back to their meeting. Piece of cake!