30-Person Indoor Group Portrait

Motivation is funny. When I'm most busy and hard at work (often from school work), I am also most wishing to be doing other things. Perhaps it's because I'm riding a high from finishing my IB104 lab practical earlier today, but particularly after reading strobist I was inspired to give this a try.

Besides whatever quirks inspires me, I hope to be able to track some of my photography experience. Notably, my experiments with one flash, one light stand, one tripod, one silver/white umbrella and a F42AM with my Sony a700 using the Sony wireless flash system.

Here's one of my recent group shots from celebrating two of my brothers' birthdays, Kevin Huang and Brian Phagley.

I placed my external flash on its own shoe and balanced it off of a couch to camera left, so it was about 3ft high, and the camera was shot from approximately 5'5" on a tripod with a radio trigger.

To do:
1) Put on a lens hood. I didn't realize the amount of lens flare I had caught from the flash. It took a lot of time photoshopping the circles out.

2) Use a light stand and set the flash off to the side.

2) Use the Stofen diffuser. This would level my bounce, and hopefully help avoid the problem of foreground overexposure and rear underexposure.

3) Use a gel. The warm lamp pulls focus to it.

4) Turn off the lamp

5) Check histogram. I well over-exposed the shot.