Advice on lighting for town event ...

[Sue Bruce]

I am photographing a town trivia event tomorrow (after they finally signed my 'usage' agreement!), and am about to go on a final walk through.

I am taking photos of teams (about 50 teams of 3 people) in the large, white marbled lined town hall building. I have the following from my home studio (I usually do product and architectural photography), but cannot decide if they will just complicate the end product ...

Portable stand with 53" paper backgrounds - white, grey, pale blue and honey brown (my fav)

Genesis 200 strobe light softbox (24x32) - which I usually use for product photography.

Don't have any umbrellas.

Would you take the background and lighting (I can vary the intensity of the flash)? I'm presuming this will be better than using a hotshoe flash and gary fong light diffuser.

Please help!

Sue

 

[Big Mike]

If you have the room/space/location to set up a pseudo studio, then I'd be tempted to bring the light and maybe the background...although, 53" may not be wide enough for 3 people.

You can still use the softbox without the background, you just need to find a good spot. A marble wall probably wouldn't be such a bad background, just make sure that your light is not casting shadows onto the background.

If you won't have the space/time to have a structured shoot like that, then you might be better off with just the hot shoe flash so that you can move around.