Advice needed - very large group shot

frg

I've been asked to do my daughters "Father Daughter" camp group pictures next month....

Scenario

Outdoors , pretty wide/flat area
around 10:00 AM in the morning
around 100 people -(50 Dads and 50 12 year old daughters)

I've got a 17-50 tamron f2.8 on a D70

I'm not too bad at individual portraits but I have never done a group of more than 5 or 6 before.......Any advice on how to pose such a large group , camera settings etc, would be very much appreciated........

Annie222

I am no professional but just recently was asked to take a school group photo of the schools dance a thon - lots of difference sized kids dressed up and the only way I could get the whole school in (its a very small school only 100 children) was to take the photo from the balcony (I was probably 2 metres from ground) with the kids looking up at me it seemed to work and the school really liked it. A thought maybe !

Andy

frg wrote:

I've been asked to do my daughters "Father Daughter" camp group pictures next month....

Read this whole post:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=13671

frg

Thanks Annie, there is actually a balcony I can shoot from

Andy, great thread, I'm only halfway through but already its given me some ideas on how to group etc.

Thanks, can't wait to try it all out

joshhuntnm

My advice is: take LOTS of pictures. The more people, the more chances someone looks gooffy. When people look at a group shot, they only look at one person--themselves. I would take it on a tripod and if you have to you could actually photoshop one face out of one picture into another.

pathfinder

There is a mathmatical algorithm that calculates how many frames are needed based on how many people are in the picture that blink. With 100 people, I think you are out of luck.

You'll need a lot of frames or will be cloning someone's head from frame to frame.

Andy

pathfinder wrote:

There is a mathmatical algorithm that calculates how many frames are needed based on how many people are in the picture and that blink. With 100 people, I think you are out of luck.

You'll need a lot of frames or will be cloning someone's head from frame to frame.

Dgrin has an answer for everything!

Antonio Correia

pathfinder wrote:

There is a mathmatical algorithm that calculates how many frames are needed based on how many people are in the picture and that blink. With 100 people, I think you are out of luck.

You'll need a lot of frames or will be cloning someone's head from frame to frame.

Where is that algorithm ?
I would like to calculate it for 4 to 10 persons ...
Please, Pathfinder ...

frg

I thought you were kidding about the algorithm.... did a search and

:hang

rule of thumb is apparently for groups of less than 20 divide the number of people by 3 in good light and 2 in bad light.... over 20 the number of shots increases exponentially ,

"photographing thirty people in bad light would need about thirty shots. Once there's around fifty people, even in good light, you can kiss your hopes of an unspoilt photo goodbye" Algorithm here :

http://velocity.ansto.gov.au/velocity/ans0011/article_06.asp

pathfinder

frg wrote:

I thought you were kidding about the algorithm.... did a search and

:hang

rule of thumb is apparently for groups of less than 20 divide the number of people by 3 in good light and 2 in bad light.... over 20 the number of shots increases exponentially ,

"photographing thirty people in bad light would need about thirty shots. Once there's around fifty people, even in good light, you can kiss your hopes of an unspoilt photo goodbye" Algorithm here :

http://velocity.ansto.gov.au/velocity/ans0011/article_06.asp

Thats it!! I knew I had read that somewhere but for the life of me I could not remember where!! But Google is our friend!!

Thank you so much - I could not remember the exact parsing, but I knew for large groups that you are rapidly SOL.
From the above link you will see this graph

Antonio Correia

Nice work, guys.
Thank you.
Quite useful !

Nikolai

frg wrote:

Scenario

Outdoors , pretty wide/flat area
around 10:00 AM in the morning
around 100 people -(50 Dads and 50 12 year old daughters)

I recently had a lot of fun shooting super large groups of people and them merging them in PS CS3.
Here's an example

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=54944

HTH

Nikolai

pathfinder wrote:

There is a mathematical algorithm that calculates how many frames are needed based on how many people are in the picture that blink. With 100 people, I think you are out of luck.

Sorry, Path, didn't see your post before my reply.

I didn't know it was not theoretically possible, I guess my groupshots of 200+ are simply figments of my imagination

Kinda proves the worth of those algorithms ...:hide

pathfinder

Ok by me Nik, it's not my theorom.

Interesting to read about, and it is easy to see that as the number of people go up, the proabablity of one of them blinking at the time of exposure rises dramatically.

Nikolai

pathfinder wrote:

Ok by me Nik, it's not my theorem.

pathfinder wrote:

Interesting to read about, and it is easy to see that as the number of people go up, the proabablity of one of them blinking at the time of exposure rises dramatically.

In theory - maybe. Unfortunately for that theory more than 50% if not all of my subjects should have had their eyes closed in my shots, which is far from reality as one can see.

I guess the biggest deifference is psychological. People can easily identify when a photographer is pointing to them and keep thier eyes open for that. They don't have to stare at him/her all the time. They can estimate the "click moment" pretty good.
And, of course, generous overlaps (like 2/3) between the frames pretty much guarantee that even if a person closed his/her eye in one shot, this wont be the case on the next one.
Redundance in action!