Forum: Photography


Subject: Concept for a group photo

ASalina opened this issue on Mar 14, 2002 ยท 11 posts


ASalina posted Thu, 14 March 2002 at 12:41 PM

I don't know enough photographers locally to try this out, but I've been toying with the idea for a while, and since Slynky posted the pointer to your self-portraits I thought I'd share this idea even if you all are unable to get together in RL to try it. The idea is to get a group photo of a bunch of photographers in the midst of doing their photography thing. Imagine if you will, a time exposure of a group of people in a dark alley all with cameras and flash units. The ones in front are on one knee and the others are standing. They are positioned so that their flash units are aimed so as not to wash out the image (some are aimed up and to the side, and others are aimed down and to the side). A long exposure time is used so that timing won't be critical as everyone fires their flash unit during the exposure, posing as though they're taking a picture of something. Bounce light from the flashes off of the walls of the alley will illuminate the group. The trick will be to aim the flash units at just enough of an angle so as not to over expose and wash out, but at the same time to convey the idea that the flash units are indeed being used to illuminate the scene. It'd probably take some patience and several tries, and of course everyone would have to stay very still during the exposure to avoid motion blur, but I think the resulting image would look pretty cool. Have any of you ever experimented with anything like this? Does it sound feasable? Dumb? Nutz?