Skool Dazed

Every so often we get hired to do some PR shots by the local school district, here in Friendly El Monte, California. The proverbial "End of the Santa Fe Trail" ...or, so we were taught, during all my years in grammer school, here in the town where I grew up.

For this session we needed to meet with some department heads for a quick outdoor, group shot .....for use as a large graphic wrap, on one of their district delivery vans. (Boy, will the graffitti artists have a field day with this one! Man! Life-sized likenesses of the school administrators... right there....just waiting to have moustaches added. Pretty easy targets.....hand me that magic marker, please. Where was this stuff when I was a kid ?)

Anyway, we used a fairly standard lighting set-up, to overpower the ambient light. The videos below show the lights and camera being set-up, as well as the actual photo session. We set up 2 main lights up high, and aiming down at the subjects....combined meter reading was f/11 at 200 iso. The other 2 lights were placed on either side of the group, behind them. These acted as kick, or separation lights....to add some highlights at the edges, and create a clean separation from the background....these were adjusted to meter at about an half stop under the main lights.

This must have been "FREE, all-you-can-drink Coffee Day" at school....cause everyone was really movin' fast......have a look