If there is a type of photography that no photographer is exempt from taking, these are, without a doubt, group photographs.
At birthdays, parties, family reunions, work meetings or any other type of event that brings together a large number of people, group portraits are the order of the day, especially if you are the one with your camera in hand.
Taking group photos isn’t as easy as it may seem: it’s not just about getting everyone together, taking a few steps back and shooting your camera. Nothing further than that.
To become a true expert in portraying large groups of people, you must take into account a wide variety of factors such as light, composition, depth of field, etc.
Don’t worry, in today’s article I will give you all the keys to become a true master of it. Hitting your next group portraits will no longer be a problem!
group photography
Group photography may seem trivial to you: just gather a group of people, move a few meters away and shoot. In reality, group portraits are much more than that: since the number of factors that you must take into account increases as the group to be photographed becomes larger.
When taking a group shot, you cannot ignore the following factors:
- Organization: if managing a model can be difficult, imagine how complicated it is to coordinate a large group of people so that they are located exactly where you need them. In order to guide your models, no matter how many they are, you must first be clear about what you want to achieve. “He who does not know where he is going, he always ends up there.”
- Lightning: a group photo taken in a room is not the same as one in the middle of a park, day or night, etc. You must evaluate very well what type of light you have for your shots, natural or artificial, and how you will use it to achieve the best results in your photographs.
- Approach: According to how the protagonists are located and in how many shots you have arranged them, the parameters of your camera to configure will be one or the other. The depth of field is essential to ensure that all your subjects are in focus, but be careful that the more you close the diaphragm, the more light you will need to take your shots. Performing a correct measurement and exposure will be essential if you do not want to over or under expose your photos and ruin the shots.
- Composition: It is not enough to pile up as many people as you come across to take your group photograph. The way you arrange each one of them can make your photos not only a portrait but also a photograph loaded with a message. What subjects will appear in the shot, what position will they occupy in the frame, what will be the background, among many others will be the aspects that you must evaluate in order to immortalize the moment, not only their characters.
Achieving a perfect shot requires that, when taking a group photograph, you combine all the elements, whether technical or visual, that allow you to obtain as a result, not only a photograph of a group of people, but one that manages to transmit endless sensations. : seriousness, joy, euphoria, etc.
Types of group photography
Not all group photos are the same, and it is important that you understand what field you are in so that you can convey one message or another in your photos. It is not the same to portray the staff of a company than to portray family members at the New Year’s Eve dinner.
The type of photography you are about to take will help you choose the best composition for it. Basically you will be able to differentiate 3 different types of group photographs:
- Formal group (professional)
- Informal group (social)
- From family group (family)
Later in the article you will find advice on how to compose your group photographs and how to place your protagonists according to the area in which you need to do it. Be patient, it’s not long now.
How to hit group portraits
Previously I told you what are the 4 fundamental factors when taking group photographs. Now it’s time for you to see why:
Organization:
If you do not organize the shots properly, it is very likely that, after taking your photos, you will realize that:
- One or more people are looking the other way.
- Some of the people, at the time of taking the photo, come out with their eyes closed
- That not everyone is expressing the same state of mind: some come out smiling, others very serious or even angry.
- There are people who have been covered by others and ended up not being in the photo.
The problem is, you can’t have the group standing around waiting for you to go through the photos one by one for errors. The ideal is that you anticipate these and be not only the photographer but the coordinator of the entire shot. Empathy will be essential, so you must rehearse your best smile, your best jokes and arm yourself with a lot of patience.
The place you choose to locate the group will also be essential, not only because of the number of people who will appear in it, but also because a large part of the message of the photograph will depend on where you are going to take it: a soccer team in its playing field, a wedding at the foot of the church, etc. The context of the photograph depends on the place you choose to take it.
At the same time you have to be careful that people stay as focused as possible and without distractions.
Depending on the number of people you are going to photograph, you will have to take your time to place them within the frame: The tallest will go behind and the shortest in front. Later in the article you will see different composition schemes that you can use when organizing your groups.
Lightning:
Choosing the place will not only help you manage the group, but also choosing a suitable location will define the lighting with which you will have to work in it.
Imagine that once you have placed the entire group in the frame, you do not notice that there is a large window or shop window behind you: when you take your shot, if you shoot a flash, its reflection in the background will completely ruin your photo.
At the same time, if the location you chose to take your shots is strongly illuminated by sunlight, the excessive contrasts (lights and shadows) produced by the harsh light of the sun will not allow you to obtain the best results either: the intensity of the Light will not only force you to close your eyes, but also the high contrast will make you lose a large amount of detail due to the inability of cameras to obtain, at the same time, details in light and dark areas at the same time.
If instead, you use a more diffuse and less intense lighting, the results you will obtain will be much better. You do not need to have very expensive equipment, or a very large work team, you can take advantage of the first hours of the day, the last hours or cloudy days to be able to work with more natural light.
I strongly recommend that you take a good read of the following two articles, so that you not only better understand how to work with light, but also how to make the most of the dynamic range of your camera:
depth of field:
The great enemy of group photography is, neither more nor less than the lack of focus in all the subjects that will appear in them. The lack of depth of field is one of the most common mistakes when taking group photos.
As I mentioned in the article “16 Ways to Give Prominence to Your Subjects”, the observer’s gaze distinguishes those objects in focus from those that are not, intuitively moving towards the former.
In group photography, the protagonist is the group as a whole, but you should not lose sight of the fact that this whole is made up of a lot of singular characters that must be portrayed in the same way so that they do not stand out from each other. This is why depth of field becomes so important.
Pay attention to the following photograph: where does your gaze go when you go through the photo?
The problem: Shallow depth of field due to the short distance from the photographer to the children despite shooting with a sufficiently closed aperture. The children in the foreground have come out completely in focus, but not the children in the next plane who have been completely out of focus.
The result: a photograph where there are only 2 protagonists and not 5 as they should have been. Your eyes will focus directly on the children in focus, making them the protagonists of the image and the characters in the background have become one more element of the environment in which the first two are.
When you find yourself taking group photographs, it is very difficult to get all the people in the frame to be on the same plane, in fact, it is almost impossible if the number of these is very large. This is why the depth of field in your photographs must be large enough (very narrow diaphragm) and the distance to the subjects far enough so that they all come into focus (sharp).
It is already difficult to achieve perfectly sharp photographs when you work with a single subject, imagine how difficult it is if you do it with many.
In order to achieve perfectly in-focus photographs, all you have to do is follow the following recommendations:
- Same focal plane: If you’re not working with large groups of people, you can try putting them all on the same plane with respect to the camera. If they are aligned in the same focal plane, just by focusing on one of them, you will get very sharp images without having to close the diaphragm so much.
- Intermediate focus point: If it is impossible for you to work with a single focal plane, either because of the number of people to include in the frame or because you have decided to compose the photo in a certain way, the ideal is that, when looking for the point of focus, choose one in between.
That is, if you have arranged the subjects in 3 different planes, the ideal is that, to make the most of the depth of field, you place the focus on the 2nd plane. In this way, when closing the diaphragm, the depth of field will include not only the subjects in the back plane, but also those in the plane before it. I recommend that you give the following article a read, if you have any doubts: “Depth of Field: Explanatory Graph”.
Keep in mind that depth of field is influenced by 3 factors:
- Diaphragm opening: the more open the diaphragm is, (smaller values: f/1.8, f/2.8, etc.) the depth of field will be less and you will get more blur in your shots, and as you use more closed diaphragms (larger values: f /22, f/32, etc.) the depth of field will be greater, making all the planes of your photos come out sharp and in focus.
- Focal distance: the smaller the focal length you use when taking your group photos (18mm, 32mm, etc.)…