Advice needed for Santa & kids shoot

darley

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Hope this is the right place. I'm an experienced photographer but have been asked to shoot a charity Christmas function in a community hall, specifically kids visiting Santa in his grotto. I foresee problems with lighting - lots of little lights in the background as well as ambient lighting, none of which I can control. I have a Canon 600D with a wireless 430EX II flash and intend using the kit 18-55 is II lens. I need fairly wide shots to include kid/Santa/grotto.

Any tips on lighting such a scene? Speedlite is controlled via camera flash so both will fire. I don't think I'll have long to set up and practice so need a basic starting point to work from. I'm thinking Speedlite off to the side bounced off ceiling and fill flash from camera, ISO 400, f5.6-6.0, WB I can figure out on the day but will shoot RAW as well.

I won't have time to do much PP as lots of parents will be wanting pics soon after!

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!
 
if you have to shoot wide because of needing to photograph a large area, one flash may not be enough. I would recommend a flash on either side of the area with a softbox diffuser or shoot-through umbrella. large softboxes are more expensive, but you dont get the spill over that the umbrellas are prone to. umbrellas are cheap though, and they DO work well if used properly. be careful if you are using your popup flash as fill since you dont have much control over it. a speedlight on the camera works best. we use three for portraits. one on camera, two off camera. all with diffusers.
 
I do a 'Pets with Santa' shoot every year (essentially the same set-up, except the dogs are probably better behaved ;) ) and I would strongly suggest going out and renting a couple of monolights, for two reasons: (1) One small speedlight isn't going to cut it for this, even if would cover the area (which I doubt). You want relatively even, flat light so that if the child turns his head, or doesn't sit the right way you don't have heavy shadows, and (2) If you're at all busy (we process about 125-150 pets/day) a speedlight may not be able to keep up, and could overheat. As well, there's the whole battery and recycle time issues....
 
Thanks for replies. Don't think there will be hundreds of people and am trying to keep costs down. Would something like a halogen worklight work, or am I being daft?!
 
A halogen light is going be hot just. Kids would most likely be uncomfortable and I would say you'd sweat to death and poor poor Santa would probably be short of a heat stroke. The mono lights or a second speed light with soft box would be your best bet. And as Tirediron you could rent these to save money.
 
Thanks for all replies. I have been mulling this over and although I want to minimize continuous lighting so as not to spoil the overall effect of the grotto, I think I may need some. The speedlite easily provides enough light to fill the area (I have tested it on site) but I was thinking of a couple of LED lights as they are fairly cheap and unobtrusive, no wires for people to trip over etc. Has anyone any experience of these and can they recommend one? I only need enough light to ensure the faces are clear so I was thinking a small LED either side.

Thanks again!
 
Regardless of what you do, if you mix different types of lights, you're going to run into white balance issues. The cheap LED panels may help a bit, but they can produce some really oddball colours of light. Good-quality, daylight balanced LEDs are very expensive. Could you borrow one or two more speedlights from someone?
 

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