Family Get-together, Kathy Wong's in Napa - January 2007

Taking Group Pictures
Family Get-togethers are priceless. How do I remember them? Is it the food, or the conversations, or the laughter? It's all three. So I try to get the message of togetherness by having all the family/friends gathers for a group picture. Group pictures on the spur of the moment are hectic to get. Not everyone knows what to do, and yet you've got to get everyone together in 15-20 minutes, or the attention-span withers. That's after you've selected an appropriate setting in which to place everyone--and to take the exposure/make the composition beforehand.

In this case we were at Kathy Wong's home in the Napa Hills. I knew the crowd was about 40-50 people, so I needed an area that would accommodate infants to 80+ year olds. While the front of her house allowed for a warm late afternoon sun, everyone would be too crowded, and I would have to have multiple rows of people. In this situation, someone is always hiding behind another's head, and the composition is fairly stiff. So I selected her back porch and stairwell. As the kids/infants were so much smaller, I elected to place them at the bottom of the back porch, and the adults, almost single-rowed, on the porch and stairwell. It worked out as a better composition.

Technical Stuff:
I had previously set up my Nikon SB-800 Flash on a lightstand, left of the camera at an angle of 30-40 degrees. I had taken an exposure with a Minolta IV-F flash meter, and made sure the aperture was as f8.0, one stop under for my camera setting of f5.6. The flash was on the manual setting of SU-4, which allowed remote firing from a flash from my aboard flash. Because my Nikon D200 was in the shop for repair, I was using my son's Sony F-828 digital camera, set on Aperture Priority, f5.6.

There's Always Something
Just before every shoot, there's many people who want you to take a picture, or who want to take a picture themselves. Of course, they need to be in the picture! That's the reason for the groups shot. So I had to polite tell those that I would send them pictures, because they needed to be in the picture...and everyone's getting ansy about having to wait and wait. Luckily, I relented with Danny Loh's camera, because it was like my Nikon; his was a D80, which I set on ASA 400 at f8.0, aperture priority.

Shoot Came Out Fine
The picture came out fine, but I re-composed my Sony F828, without realizing I had cut off people on the left. Luckily, when I shot with Danny's D80, I included everything, because I was used to the Nikon controls and viewfinder.

Afterwards
Danny Loh came up to try to understand how my flash fired with his camera. I gave him a lesson on Nikon Commander Mode, which he really wanted--for the first time he really understood what it took to make a camera with multiple flashes, on- and off-camera.

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