Family Portraits and portraits of children

[Aakajx]

Hi All, Ive been asked by a friend to do a family portrait. At first I said yes thinking it was just her, her husband and the 2 kids but its more. Ive told her I'm new to photography and Ive got alot to learn. so this will be more experience for me. I'm nervous because Ive never had to take a large family portrait before. ive done a few for my own family but i had no pressure and the was always the one family member that was looking away or blinking. I dont have a studio. For me lighting is a worry as-well. as I dont want harsh shadows anything. She also wants cute photos of her baby on a rug. but again i dont have studio equipment and Im not 100% sure how to do the cute baby on a rug photos. the baby is about 3 months old.

Any advice and tips would be appreciated.

 

[tirediron]

You don't need a lot of fancy gear for a shoot like this; I recently did a family reunion shoot where we had eighteen people posed inside an average family home living room. Line 'em all up, tallest in the back, children sitting on the floor, make sure no one's face is blocking anyone else's, and tell everyone NOT to move and start shooting, after exach exposure, refocus their attention on you, and go for a half-dozen exposures. There should be one that's good, and failing that, as long as they don't move much, moving faces isn't too tough. Lighting can be very simple; I had two SB600s on each side of the room firing away from the family into the corner of the wall/celing which turned them into giant reflectors. It wasn't dramatic or even really interesting lighting, but it worked.

 

[Walt_T]

Find a window that is big enough, if you can. Shoot with it behind you. If it is sunny outside use a white fabric to cover the window and create a huge softbox. For the baby-photo: Take a table and place it next to a window. Place the rug on it. Cover the window with white fabric.

Oh, kill all the other light in the room. You will only get strange color mixes or very confusing light in our photo. If everything fails try to make the images Black and White

 

[xj0hnx]

If everything fails try to make the images Black and White

lulz

 

[Braineack]

it's pretty sound advice.

 

[Derrel]

Get rug. Bring in cute baby. Place cute baby on rug. Use some type of fairly soft, even light to make images of cute baby on rug. As Tirediron alluded to, firing a flash unit into a wall, or a wall/corner or a ceiling/wall/corner junction can create some very nice, soft light, by virtue of the bounced light creating a LARGE source of light.

If you fire a flash at an angle, it bounces off in the same angle...light "bounces" like a billiard ball...the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection...and since a speedlight or studio flash has a "beam spread" of some xx degrees, the bounced light makes a BIG, fairly wide "swath" or "path" of light, which is...soft light because the source is BIG, relative to the size of a baby on a posing rug or in a basket.

If the wall or ceiling/wall or ceiling/corner/wall junction is 8 to 10 feet away from the kid, you'd probably end up using ISO 400 and f/5.6, and getting a really nice, almost North Light Studio type of look, but with full color. I've used bounced flash off of walls and corners and ceiling/corner for years; the thing is, sometimes you can experiment and place the flash on a stand, and then aim it with the flash head zoomed to 85mm, and if the exact aim is right, you can get some AMAZING bounce lighting! Not every single aiming position of the flash is ideal...if you aim the flash wrong, in relation to the subject's area, the effect might be only mediocre. But if you experiment, and move the light around, at times you can get a REALLY AMAZING light quality, where there's in effect, some frontal light and also some "top light" that rains down, and also maybe a little bit of catchlights in the eyes from where the original impact of the light creates a "Hot spot" on the wall.