Group Shot of the Cast of Smokey Joe’s Café
A shoot that slipped past the blog – the official photo of the Cast of Smokey Joe’s Café, performed by Kingston Vale Operatic & Dramatic Society. This shot was for use in the production programme. Some basic ideas for the setup came from David Hobby’s Strobist DVD set, where he takes a group shot in a large auditorium. However, the problems for me were slightly different to those he faced…
To get a good vertical spread of the cast members, I needed to pose them on the front of the stage. Whilst I would have liked to have some more effective lights behind the cast members, this wasn’t going to be practical, as the red curtain was only a couple of feet from the edge of the stage. Opening the curtain wasn’t a realistic option, as the stage was full of part built scenery. The only way around the problem was to squeeze a light in right behind the back row, and squeeze as much separation out of it as I could get.
The lighting in the final shot is a little hot in places, but for shoots such as this, you only get a minute or two with everyone in position, so I had to try to pre-visualise the results as much as possible, with very little opportunity for fine tuning once the cast were in place.
So, the full setup was as follows:
SB-26 behind back row (tightly wedged in front of the curtain) on ~1/8 for some hairlight/separation in the back row;
SB-800 ~1/8 to high rear left for more of the same, clamped onto a beam at the side of the stage;
SB-900 (~1/4; may even have been as high as 1/2) through umbrella from high camera left;
SB-800 through umbrella from mid camera right (~1/8).
The SB-900 was triggered by a PocketWizard with all the other flashes in optical slave mode, and all settings on manual.
And finally, for those who are interested in shots I took from the production itself, you can get to them here.
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