A Family Shoot & Overcoming Unexpected Problems

I had the opportunity to shoot a really lovely family on Sunday afternoon. The group consisted of three sisters, their father, and the eldest daughter's partner. I used two speedlights and only one lighting setup for the entire shoot to make things simple and to work efficiently.




The problems I encountered:
Firstly, I thought that there would only be the three sisters, three is easier to manage than five. And easier to light with speedlights too.
Secondly, the room I had to work with was an almost empty bedroom...way too small for comfort!
Thirdly, the youngest sister really did not want to have her photograph taken.

My solutions:

First of all, I decided to use a simple cross-lighting setup for the shoot. The options I chose between were either the setup I used, or two lights from the front, one from either side of the camera. Before the shoot I committed to using the cross lighting setup to give the shots a little more edge and some separation from the black backdrop.
The lighting diagram to the right is roughly how it was set up. Looking at it again now, the bare strobe was rotated more clockwise, pointing towards the left side, rather than at the other light.
The black backdrop was just a large black cloth, pinned up to a wardrobe on one side and a light stand on the other. I really would have liked to increase the distance from the group to the background as the rear light was hitting the cloth and lighting it, which meant that I had to draw the blacks down in Photoshop for each image.
I also would have liked to have more distance between the rear light and the group so that it was pointing more towards me rather than across the frame. This would have given the entire group a bit of an edge on their left sides and also would not have been so harsh on the person closest to it. Also, in some shots, it caused a shadow from one person to fall on to the next.
Lastly, due to the small working distance, I was forced to use my 14-24mm lens for a lot of the shots, which caused their heads to vary in size in the photograph due to their varying distances to the camera.
It would have been nice to stick with just my 50mm lens and move forwards or backwards rather than switching between lenses over and over but you have to work with what you've got!

As a whole, I'm very happy with the results that I ended up with, and I really hope that the family is too. I'm looking forward to getting some feedback from them. We had plans to head to a local reserve and get some outdoor shots, which would have been fantastic but the weather was not in our favour. I ended up snapping off about 75 photos in around 40 minutes after I had the lighting set up and I supplied them with 45.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog!

Benen

Here are a couple more from the shoot: