Where to Photograph 11 People?

"Oh, the group portrait? We needed to add a few people. We have 11 now."

Frustrating? Actually, exhilarating!

How do you create a group portrait for marketing purposes, anyway?

For me and my team, unless there is an extremely compelling reason, we try to stay off the plain, vanilla hung background and find something interesting in the environment. Something that will talk about the team we are photographing.

In this case, the end client ran a restaurant style dining hall. It was a well designed and lit space, with interesting colors and graphic elements. It also allowed us to build layers into the composition.

We balance the daylight, ambient and added a couple of strobes to punch up the dark areas and then started adding the people in one by one. All in all, it was about a two hour set up to complete.

Was it worth the time it took? The best answer I can think of to that is to think like a magazine editor. If you were laying out an article about these folks and wanted to get the readers' attention, what would you put on the cover: a couple of plain headshots or an image with rich colors that tells the story? What would you want to see if you were reading the story?