I ran across a great article about a month ago by David Ziser, a wedding photographyer. He was highlihgting another site he’d seen that displayed an interesting take on family portraits. The photographer shot each sub-family separately over several months and then composited them together. The result was a great, very large, family portrait (click here for the full story).

A large part of our family met over Christmas and we decided to try a similar setup (click the image above for a larger version). While we had everyone together at once and didn’t need to shoot separately over time, we still saw several benefits to shooting one family at a time. They included:
-Lack of Space: We didn’t have nearly enough room to fit everyone (about 35 people) together in one big shot, especially indoors.
-Individual Family Shots: We wanted to give individual families a nice, quick portrait as well. We didn’t want to have folks pose more than once–there was already enough going on and we wanted the whole shoot to go as quick as possible.

So, we set up a few strobes, a background, put the camera on a tripod and started shooting.
Read on for information about how we took the shots and basic steps on what we did in Photoshop. I’ll also detail the lessons learned, which were equally as valuable.

Shooting

1. Set up a camera, on a tripod, about 12 feet away from a background. I would have liked a little more room, but the space we were shooting in was a little limited.
2. Set up two 400-watt strobes, each at 45 degrees from the subjects. Set one about half a stop less than the other.
3. Brought each sub-family in, one at a time, and took several frames. Exposure, zoom, etc. were left untouched between families. See below for an example of one of the sub-family shots, un-cropped. The ruler at the left served as an aid in ensuring proper sizing.
4. The official stats on the shot were: shot with a Canon 40D, 24-70 2.8 lens at 27mm. f11, 1/200 sec, ISO 100.

Photoshop Post–Production

Let me start by saying that this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive (or even very thorough) Photoshop tutorial. I wanted to briefly outline the approach and tools I used without going into overkill on specific steps.

1. Opened in Lightroom (my favorite tool for initial photo sorting, editing and printing).
2. Did a few basic edits – not much really. Increased exposure/contrast a bit. Upped the color vibrance and did some pre-sharpening.
3. Opened and brought each photo into Photoshop. I created a very wide, blank canvas and moved each individual photo onto the canvas. I arranged as desired. I also renamed the layers, as shown, which made a big difference throughout the work.
   
4. I then cropped each individual photo in, leaving about 1/4-1/2 inch on each side of the people. That would allow Photoshop to do the heavy lifting in the next steps.
   
5. Working my way left to right, I did three things for each set of two pictures that touched.
   • First, I bumped the two pictures just enough to overlap that 1/4-1/2 inch of the background and then selected the two layers. Then, I took advantage of one of Photoshop CS3’s new features, Auto-blend Layers. I’ve spent lots of time merging panoramas in the past. They were a pain. With this feature, they aren’t – it simply rocks. To use it, select the layers and choose Edit > Auto Blend Layers and Photoshop does the rest.
     Now, there are a few things you need to make sure happen to get this to work right. First, don’t try more than 2 layers at a time. I know, it’s tempting, but the exposure and other items tend to get mangled. It’s worth the extra time to go two pictures at a time. Also, make sure that the adjoining pictures are overlapping just enough, but not too much. If any of the people end up getting overlapped, Photoshop will try and blend that person and it doesn’t turn out well.
   • I would then select the two same layers and merge them together. Doing that was an important piece of preparing for the next step. It was also critical to allow the new, larger, piece to appropriately blend when merged with the next family over (remember how I said you can only blend two things at once?).
   • After that, I decided if I should have anyone overlapping. It’s a trade-off. Doing it makes the photo look much more realistic, but it takes time. I ended up doing it about 3 times. I would cut out around one of the images, then slide them together and use the clone/healing tools to reblend the background. As time allows, you can also do some fancy dodging/burning/shadow creation to make it look like someone is truly in front of someone else.
   • I then worked my way over, merging the growing piece with the next family in line. I cropped the final photo down and, voila, huge family portrait.

Lessons Learned

• Distance from the camera to the subject is very important (much more so than I originally thought). When taking shots, make sure you measure the distance between the camera and subject and then set marks on the floor for folks to stand on. It will go a long way toward making sure everyone appears the proper size, relative to each other.
• Pull them out from the background when lighting. This isn’t really a shocker and it is something I would have done if I had more space (which we didn’t). It worked out fairly well even though there wasn’t much space, but adding more space would have created avoided shadows on the background, lighting it more evenly. That would have helped merging layers in Photoshop and would create a more seamless background.
• Plan to spend some time in Photoshop in post production. I spent a few hours for this photo and could have spent much more. If I were printing this at a larger size (or selling it) I would spend more time cutting folks out and overlapping them with other families. It’s definately the most tedious part of the process, but well worth it.