Group and Family Portraits

Tony Northrup covers family group portraits: muted clothing, or white shirts and jeans for larger groups, clean backgrounds like a hillside or beach, 20 to 30 feet behind subjects, a $50 backdrop kit for up to seven, apple boxes or books to vary heights, a 1/125 shutter and avoiding f/2.8.

Scott Robert Lim shares his large-group wedding strategy in a CreativeLive clip: find even shade, add off-camera flash to enrich colour, zoom to the longest lens, 70 to 105mm, to compress the background, pose every person, climb high to show every face, and have running bridal parties link arms.

Pye Jirsa of SLR Lounge gives seven steps for wedding group portraits: set ambient exposure for mood, light in the window's direction, meter on a stand-in, use a Profoto OCF beauty dish, pose with overlapping connections, and for large groups light sections from a tripod and composite in Photoshop.

Denis Reggie, after 1,900 weddings, sets up formal groups: bride on the groom's right, bridesmaids in front, groomsmen behind, and a 36-inch white umbrella beside the groom carrying two CTO-gelled Canon 600EX flashes, triggered by an ST-E3 on a 5D Mark IV with a 24-70mm at 35 to 50mm.

Spyros Heniadis explains three elements of sharp group photos: depth of field, focus point and lens. Using toy soldiers and a depth-of-field calculator app, he shows 30mm at f/2.8 from 20 inches yields 0.13 inches of sharpness, then stops to f/7.1 and f/14, focusing between front and back rows.

Tim Kelly describes photographing a 24-person family on a twelve-foot Kelly beige muslin by posing five family groups separately, grandparents in the centre, children on the ends as leading lines, mothers favoured and nobody stacked, then blending groups into one portrait, as with his own forty-strong family outdoors.

Five keys for group photos with a nifty fifty: leave space around the group for cropping; stop down from f/1.8, barely a foot of focus at ten feet, to f/2.8 or f/5.6; focus on the middle; shoot 1/100 to 1/160, faster with children; and use its natural field of view.

Chelsea Nicole gives five steps for tack-sharp group portraits: align everyone's toes on one focus plane, focused on the centre; use a 24-70mm for full-body groups; keep the shutter at 1/200 or double the focal length; and shoot f/2.8 for six or fewer, f/3.5 or f/4 for staggered rows.