OK, so... all things considered, it went pretty well. I rented a 2000W power pack, 3 heads, 2 umbrellas, and a softbox. Since I was shooting down onto the group from the ladder, I ended up positioning two bare heads at the right and left of the lobby entrance and pointing them up and in towards the scene and bouncing them off the ceiling. I was getting some weird cross shadows doing this, so just as the group was arriving I switched the two heads from full power on their own channels in differential mode (A:B) to the same channel (channel A) and then I setup a third strobe in a shoot-through umbrella and positioned it in front of the group at the foot of the ladder, in the center of the scene, also pointing up towards the ceiling. I put this third strobe in channel B at reduced power (either 250 or 500W, I can't remember).
The tweaked the angle of the bare strobes a bit and then the light was pretty uniform. I still had to bump my ISO up to 640 in order to achieve a barely adequate shutter speed of 1/30th at f4. I was shooting at 19mm on my 17-40 f4 L lens with the Canon 40D, and I wished my 17-55 IS f2.8 had been available because I could have really used the image stabilizer. I didn't want to go any higher in terms of ISO, and according to my back LCD panel, 1/40th was a bit too dark. I didn't want to underexpose and push in post because I was afraid those tiny little faces might get smothered in noise.
I did a few tighter shots so that the faces wouldn't be so small. This was the best one in terms of expressions:
I backed off a bit to get more of the size and depth of the architecture and the colours of the coffee shop in the background.
I combined these two frames in Photoshop where I did some local-contrast USM on the floor to make it more shiny. I then and darkened the edges to shape the light around the group.
Here is a closeup of the center portion of the final image where you can see the expressions and the light on the faces.
Once we had the group shot, I asked everyone to push their scheduled sitting by 20 minutes to give myself enough time to setup the soft-box and figure out how to light the headshots.
I decided to use the ambient light of the coffee shop at the far end of the lobby as my background. I setup my 70-200 f2.8 IS on a tripod a few feet in front of the entrance and set up the soft box and reflector about half way between the entrance and the coffee shop. I wanted to shoot at 200mm to throw the background out of focus. But I couldn't get the power on the powerpack low enough to use the ambient exposure. Even at 250 W with the variator turned all the way down and a second head plugged into the power pack pointed away from the scene to dump even more power out of it, I still had way too much light from the softbox and the background was almost pitch-black. I was already running 5 mins past the first scheduled headshot sitting, so I turned the softbox away from the posing chair and bounced the light from the softbox onto one of the reflective pillars along the lobby wall. At full power, there was just enough light bouncing off the shiny pillar and onto my subject to shoot at f5, 1/50th of a second @ ISO 800. And that was slow enough to allow the light from the coffee shop to come through.
The exposure on most of these was pushed a bit in Lightroom, usually between +.30 and + .6. I chose my favourite from each sequence, white-balanced and cropped in Lightroom. I will probably smoothen out the skin a bit and maybe get rid of the second catchlight. Also, these are my picks, not the clients'. They haven't seen the photos yet and may very well choose other faves from each sequence.
Thanks very much for engaging with me on this one and for the advice, the suggestions, and the food for thought -- my heart sank when the original location (that beautiful hotel lobby), fell through and I realized where I would be shooting. In the end it worked out ok.
Fabrice
Linear Mode
