Registered: Nov 18, 2002
Total Posts: 7939
Country: United States
A group of 5- 6 is well within the capability of your current flash gear if you utilize it effectively. The primary goals for groups are: 1) good expressions on the faces, 2) even light on the front of ALL faces so the expressions can be seen, 3) as few distractions from the faces as possible (i.e. hands, foreground, stuff behind/above the heads)
The ideal situation would be to shoot outdoor in an area where the sun can be used as backlight on the subjects while at the same time it shades the background:
That would allow you to do the job with a single flash on a bracket because in that situation the sky would provide a tremendous amount of wrap around fill.
If must shoot indoors that same strategy - backlight + centered frontal fill on bracket - is ideal.
There are simply too many pitfalls with group if a single-person lighting strategy such as short lighting (i.e. key 45 degrees from nose, fill over camera) is used. Short lighting requires precise positioning of the nose to the light to avoid a distracting nose shadow. With five noses in a photo getting them all perfectly aligned to a key light off to the side is very difficult, especially in a production line situation. When the key light is put off to one side and people in a group turn towards the center the people closest to the light wind up broad-lit with faces half in shadow and overexposed. Thus the better strategy for getting even light in all the faces it to put the light where the faces are looking - over the camera on a bracket. Then park your 420ex behind and above or off to one side for the back-rim light component for a look just like out in the sunshine.
Other tips for groups, such as shooting downward from a ladder cab be found in my group tutorial: http://super.nova.org/DPR/Groups/PhotographingGroups.pdf
Chuck
