The challenge of this assignment was to photograph 26 people at the same time, all presenters of different TV programs of TV3, the Catalan Television. The set had been set up a day earlier to cover the entire shooting area with homogeneous lighting.
I decided that the light should not be too contrasty because of the color of the clothes that each character would be wearing. They had previously been asked to wear dark or black clothing, and if a very harsh light had been used, details would have been lost in the shadows. But a soft light has to be close and big, so I had to resort to working with palios, the typical large diffusers used in film.
For the scenery I decided to use a corner of one of the dishes that the company has and to use ladders, chairs and drawers, in order to achieve a distribution of the characters with a certain variety of poses and that they did not look like a soccer team, posing in two rows, all the same. The extension of the plane was very wide so I had to resort to a large canopy of 3.6 x 3.6 meters, with a very thin translucent fabric.
On the opposite side I placed another smaller canopy, 2×2 mts. to reduce the overall contrast and a third canopy of the same size to qualify the incidence of the main light on the background. The additional difficulty was that I wanted to use as “props”, old continuous light bulbs that were not very powerful in relation to the light of the flashes.
The final picture
I used two Profoto D2 torches, with their respective 5″ hexagonal windows. The windows took away some light and the diffuser even more. As the photograph was taken from some distance I had no problems with depth of field, but at least I had to achieve an aperture of f11. There was no problem getting to it at ISO 400, as the flashes are very powerful.
As can be seen in the previous photograph, the two windows generate a light with slight
The light distribution on the canopy was quite homogeneous.
The day after setting up the set and lights, we set about the photography. But as is often the case with jobs, unforeseen events arise. In this case, not everyone was able to attend the session at the same time and the photo had to be taken in parts. For this I used a tripod and fixed a fence around it so that it would not move a millimeter during the day and thus facilitate the subsequent assembly. The work ended up being done on two different days because it was difficult to get so many people together at the same time.
Ramón Pellicer and others
The news team was the first to arrive and I placed them to one side of the frame. After several takes, the job was finished. I don’t usually shoot a lot because I have a long professional career working with film, times when we professionals were used to shoot only what was necessary to obtain the desired result.
The second take was more complicated because, due to the roles of each character, they could not all be grouped together.
Even more difficult was the third group who were all far apart.
Ricard Ustrell
And the fourth photograph was an individual one of one of the star presenters, next to an old TV camera.
As you can see in the second photo, there was a journalist who never made it and we had to put a photo of him, framed.
Lighting scheme
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