Panaromic Group Portrait in Shanghai
Apart from photographing 2,000 delegates at the Song Dynasty Theatre in Hangzhou, China, I also needed to photograph the delegates at dinner. This was pretty much something that came up at the last moment so I was not really prepared for it. I knew I had 8 units of Nikon Speedlights in the bag but it would not be enough to light such a big area. There were approximately 200 tables in ballroom.
The only option I had was using available light but just how much light was available? I also knew that I could rely on exceptional high ISO performance from my Nikon D3s but this photo was meant to be enlarged to a wall sized mural.
The Bund, Shanghai, China
Since using my Nikon Speedlights was not an option, I decided to shoot with available light. Since the print was meant to be enlarged to about 6 metres (20 feet), I needed maximum resolution from the digital file.
The test shots we did in the evening before the delegates arrived indicated an exposure of 1/60 sec @ f/11 at ISO 2000. The lens used was the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ‘goldfish bowl’ lens! One reason why I felt confident of having enough resolution for the enlargement is that the group photograph would be captured using 5 different exposures. I had decided to create a panaromic shot of the ballroom. The final shot was a combination of 5 different exposures and it was all joined together using DoubleTake software on the Mac.
Murphy’s Law is always in play and this almost doomed our group photograph to failure. Someone decided that it would be more dramatic if the lights were turned down low as the Managing Director of the company walked in. We had to frantically turn the lights back on as we had only a window of 5 minutes in which to make the shot since everyone would be standing up for the Managing Director’s entrance. Something about the lights in the ballroom; when it is turned off and then on, it takes about 5 minutes for it to get to maximum brightness. I did not have 5 minutes as everyone was standing up and waiting for me. I was not behind the camera at this point so in spite of the added exposure needed to capture the scene, the camera was in manual mode and the exposure, although 3-stops underexposed was not adjusted!
As you can see from the final shot, we managed to pull it off in spite of the problems.
