Yearbook Portrait help

[quarto]

Hello,

I have been asked if I would be willing to take yearbook photos for my school. I will be using my Canon EOS 40d and I think I will try my 50mm/f1.8II as it will be all head and shoulder shots. I will also use my speedlite 580 EXII and I have a good tripod. I am not all that experienced at portrait photography and would appreciate some simple tips on how to use my kit to acheive the best results.

Thanks,
Quarto

 

[fletch5]

spend the time to set up the area and get everything in the right place before you start, if you got a light stand it would help, or hire some proper lights, and google for poses or Yearbook Photo Tutorial, im sure lots will come up, dont forget the background. be a pain in the bum to photoshop it out of hundreds of photos!!!

 

[dakid]

I just had a friend's help in doing this for my choir. As it turned out, it's simply going to be group shots, but at least I was prepared. Anyway, I'll explain how I was going to do it, and you can see if that's helpful to you at all.

This is the setup:

The screen is a clean but creased white sheet, draped over a stand he had. The flash blows out all the creases.

The remote flash was a cheap, secondhand one, with some greaseproof paper taped over the end of it (not touching the flash) to diffuse it, and it was triggered by a "Hama Flash Slave Wireless".

The flash attached to the camera was a Sigma one that apparently had TTL but didn't do it very well. It had some cardboard taped to the end of it and foil folded around it, like this...

Here's a test shot, taken just before we finalised the setup:

You can see the shadow behind him to the right; this is because the flash behind him was pointed directly backwards. When we twisted it to point at that shadow, all shadows behind him disappeared.