One Light Magazine Cover Group Photo

This is a group photo I shot for a magazine cover I did on location last year. The assignment was to get photos from an animal hospital but with focus on the father leaving the control over the company to the daughter (but they wanted the sitting guy in the picture as well).

Hospitals are not very well known for their nice lighting, and the same goes for animal hospitals. Everything is almost white or a shade of light orange, I guess it might have a calming effect or something like that.

As it was late a winter day, and no natural light left anywhere, I brought my Profoto AcuteB 600R with me. I did not know beforehand if we were going to shoot the group photo outside the hospital or indoors. Sooner or later guess I will buy a BatPac, just to be able to use my Profoto D1s, but until then, the AcuteB works fine.

For the article in the magazine, I just shot with the available light inside the hospital, but for the cover shot I thought it would be better to give their skin tones a small chance of looking good.

Because this was a group shot, I felt I needed to use at least f/5.6 so everyone in the group would be sharp in the picture. Usually I prefer to blur the background a little more, but they were renovating large areas of the hospital, so we had to make do with a small spot where we could have their DT-scanner as background.

If I would have turned a little to the left or right, there would mostly be hammers, or ladder or paint buckets or stuff wrapped in plastic. Not so fun on a cover.

With a shutter speed of 1/60s (and aperture 5.6), quite a lot of the ambient light inside coming from the fluorescent lamps became a part of the lighting.

With a relatively tight shot as this, it worked out well, but looking at the behind the scenes photo at the start of this post, or even the uncropped version, there are large colour shifts from side to side. I guess I could have solved that with the help of a little gel, but I think that it adds to the picture a bit, not having it too sterile.

When I am on assignments like this, I like to travel light. Usually I work with available light for this kind of photos, but it helps to be able to control the light a bit. But this was before I bought two Profoto Umbrella XL (they would have been perfect to light a small group photo like this), so I just packed my large 5-foot softbox Octa.

One thing that I have to remember the next time I do a cover shot like this is to go even closer. The magazines I work with usually wants either a lot of stuff around the people in the photo, or a very tight portrait. The ones in-between mostly gets cropped, a with a 12MP file from a D700, cropping quickly leads to a too small image.

But, as soon as I get my D800, that will not be a problem. I hope.