Small group shot lighting with beauty dish

Setting the lights and doing headshots in the studio is easy compared to a group shot, there are so many more variables that you have to account for, not to mention the number of eyes that has to be open at the same time. And everything else.

I don’t do group shots that often, but this time there were three Swedish comedians that needed a couple of publicity photos for their new show. Who can say no to a comedian? Or three?

Instead of trying some complex lighting I took the easy way and kept it as simple as possible. One main light straight on from above and a little fill from below, all on the same axis as the camera.

Simple two-light setup for a small group

I like simple photos, especially when there are great personalities involved, in this case three smart comedians used to stand on the scene with nothing more than a microphone and maybe a glass of water.

Placing them backed up against the background paper made it easy to get everything around them almost the same shade of grey. If I had a bigger studio, I might have tried something different such as lighting the background separately, but with quite short shooting distance this was much easier.

A Beauty Dish for contrast

The light from above comes from a white Profoto Softlight Reflector (beauty dish) aimed at their chests. This creates a simple light with nice catchlights but not too dark eye sockets.

As the lighting is on the same axis as the camera, I don’t have to worry too much about how their heads are angled and stuff like that. Now everyone in the picture is lit the same way, and they are on about the same distance from the camera and the lights.

To get them all in focus I had to use an aperture of f/14 (just to be on the safe side) and the lens was the 24-70/2.8 on a Nikon D700 body. The full length group shot is shot at 42 mm and the closer group portrait is around 60 mm I think.

A zoom lens was the easiest solution when switching between different types of group shot without having to change lenses all the time.

Fill light for the shadows

To avoid getting the shadows too deep and dark, I placed a Profoto Compact with the standard reflector behind a frame with diffusion material right below the camera.

This light helps both with getting the background paper evenly lit (at least the part under their feet) and lifting the shadows just a little bit.

As you can see in their eyes, the lower light, the fill, looks like a small and hard light source, so I don’t really know how much good the diffusor did.

Without the fill light, the dark suits and the shadows behind their legs would have been completely black with no details left. In post processing I chose to make their dark clothing even darker, but at least I had some details if I would have wanted it that way.

Feet, hands, bodies, eyes times three or six

Group shots are very much about getting a lot of stuff right, but for me, the main thing is to get the overall feeling right. If you focus too much on getting every part to be in the right position or pose, it will probably look very stiff. And boring.

We tried a few poses but gave up and just took a lot of photos.

One of the good things about a really simple lighting setup is that when sifting through a lot of photos to find the ones they liked, every photo was useable, lighting-wise.

We opted for black and white quite early, but I did some of them in colour just to see the result.

I think it is ok, but the black and white versions are better as the focus is solely on their faces and their expressions.

A black and white image when there are more than one face involved is also much easier to fix. Differencies in skin type and tone and colour doesn’t matter that much.

In colour photos one persons pale winter complexion might clash a bit with the others and draw attention to stuff like that rather than the smile (or grin).

The post processing part was quite easy, I toned down a little shine on their foreheads and added a little contrast with a Gradient Map (blend mode Soft Light and adjust the opacity until the effect is not too strong, about 20% I think).

I think that a ring flash (which I don’t have, yet) and a beauty dish would have been perfect for this kind of group shot. Until then, this is a very easy lighting setup that works well for smaller groups. I guess that if there would have been more that five people in the picture, the light falloff on the sides could become a problem.

But I rather have just one face per photo to focus on.