when photographing more than one

[sascha]

I'm sure this is photography 101 but with all the practice I am just not getting a good grasp of where to focus when I'm taking a shot of more than one person, two comes out okay but when my husband and sons are in one shot together, it's just a mess.
They always say focus on the eyes when you are shooting one person, okay, that's great, but what if there are three pairs of eyes does it have to do with the aperture as well? Typically I always shoot in aperture priority, if anyone has some shots they could share with me with EXIF I'd really appreciate it!
Thanks!

[oldwolf]

set your f/stop to about 9ish or 10ish and focus on the person in the middle of the group. so if you're have a group that's 3 people deep then focus on the middle person in the second row.

this is what i do at least and it turns out ok. i might increase my f/stop depending on how deep the group is or how wide it is.

gl with it.

[sascha]

Originally Posted by oldwolf

set your f/stop to about 9ish or 10ish and focus on the person in the middle of the group. so if you're have a group that's 3 people deep then focus on the middle person in the second row.

this is what i do at least and it turns out ok. i might increase my f/stop depending on how deep the group is or how wide it is.

gl with it.

Thanks wolf, that gives me so much more to go on than what I've been doing!

[PhotoNewt]

To further elaborate on Oldwolf's response and to answer your original question, yes is all about the aperture.

Think of the aperture as the setting that will control how everything else around your focus point will render in the final image. When you focus on the eyes of your subject, you have set the lens to achieve focus on a thin plane at a set distance from your sensor, everything that falls on this plane will be in sharp focus, everything in front and behind this plane will not. The aperture will offer control about this area in front and behind the focus plane; the smaller the aperture, the wider the area where acceptable focus will be maintained. This is the concept of depth-of-field (DoF) that you see mentioned so often by season photographers, learning to control it with your aperture is key to achieving the results you want.

So as Wolf correctly points out, for group shots f/5.6 - f/11 depending on the lens used, the distance from camera to subject and depth of your group, is a good starting point.

[sascha]

Thanks, Photonewt, eventually I'll wrap my brain around all of this stuff.

[Darth Marty]

Theres loads to learn isnt there?! Jeez Im glad you asked this question cos I needed to myself!!

[PhotoNewt]

You can do a simple experiment that will help you understand better what aperture does for image sharpness.

Focus your eyes on any subject that is distant, perhaps 10 feet away. Make a mental note of how everything looks. Then take a black piece of heavy construction paper and make a small peep hole, look through the hole and focus on the same subject. You will notice the entire image is now sharper - the only difference is that you are looking through a small peep hole.

This is what the diaphragm aperture does to your image - as you decrease the aperture (by increasing the f/number) your image will become sharper and more of it in focus, up to a point where the aperture is so small that it causes the light to diffract and the image sharpness to deteriorate. The point at which diffraction occurs depends, among others, on the size of the sesor you use - for a typical cropped sensor SLR it starts to be noticiable beyond f/11 or so.