Family portrait, 22 subjects, outside, at night. Creative lighting needed.

[steamboatscott]

I have a client who wants a family portrait of 22 people the day before Thanksgiving. Problem is, not everyone can arrive from traveling until 6pm, so it will be dark outside. I'm obviously going to try and arrange at least a few shots indoors, but the client wants at least one outdoors.

I know this will be tricky to get an impressive photo, but any advice on lighting? I don't think there will anything of particular interest on the house exterior or landscaping that I will want to expose into the picture. I'm only semi-pro (just charging small amounts to pay for my equipment and gain experience) and shoot a Canon XSi with an EF-S 17-55 f/2.8, an EF 50mm f/1.8 and have a Speedlite 580EX II. The best idea I've come up with now is to bring a couple halogen work lights and add fill with my speedlite.

[zona5101]

Sounds like fun. Couple of thoughts... halogen work lights good idea, mixing with daylight balanced flash might give you some undesireable color casts and might be hard to fix. You can gel your flash or maybe even do with out it. In either case your best bet is to try it out first before the event. Thought number 2 - controlling depth of field - with 22 faces out there there may be a lot of distance between the closest set of eyes and the ones furthest away. So you'll need to put some thought into how you arrange them. I am guessing the halogens set to evenly light that many folks isn't going to give you a whole lot of light to get a decent shutter speed and great dof. Good to know what kind of coverage those halogens will provide beforehand. Maybe they would spring for the cost of renting some pro lighting gear?

[oldwolf]

if they're willing to hold still long enough then set them up in their positions with some space between them. have them make a funny pose or something that would personify them or show off their personality. set your shutter speed really long and go around flashing each one individually with a snoot on your flash.

it was done in a book i read. i think it was the hot shoe diaries or something like that but it was done in an auditorium? turned out pretty cool.

[FormElement]

Are you making enough to buy a cheap Lumopro LP120 and a couple of cactus triggers? You are looking at about $200 to double your strobe output and get it off the camera.

[steamboatscott]

Really like the idea about the individual snooting. I'm going to give that a try.

Regarding off-camera flash, thanks for the pointer to Cactus Triggers. Way cheaper than pocket wizards...I think I'll pick up a set, as I can borrow another 580 EX II. I'm assuming with something like this, I'd need to manually set the flash exposure and wouldn't be able to take advantage of ETTL like with the Canon firing?

[FormElement]

Correct. No TTL at all. Besides, TTL won't do you any good in the dark anyhow. For that number of people, you're probably still looking at one on full power ond one on half to still get your ratio and an acceptable exposure. Hard strobe, in the pitch dark, I just did a little test shoot for my own education two nights ago. I had to crank up 1/4 power ON MY 430EXII for one subject at 6 feet, 85mm zoom on the strobe, and f/4 @ ISO100.

Great luck on being able to borrow the 580EXII! With that you actually could pull a master/slave setup and get eTTL. Like I said though, it might give you more trouble than it's worth. You can also master/slave on full manual too. The only catch is that your fill will always be straight on-axis. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just a consideration.

Since I am new to off camera lighting, I have been studying and playing with everything I can learn. David Hobby's blog (strobist.blogspot.com) is a wealth of information and he posts actual light layouts to show what he did.