How can I photograph a very large group indoors and keep everyone sharp?

Question

I was asked at short notice to photograph a group of 100+ people indoors, arranged in four rows on choir seating. The room had fluorescent and overhead flood lighting. I used a Nikon D90 with an 18-200mm lens at 22mm, plus three flashes: two bounced off a white ceiling from the sides and one on-camera. The results were poor, especially toward the edges where focus/sharpness fell apart, although color was acceptable.

For a group this large, what should I do differently to improve sharpness across the whole group and get more even lighting and better color?

user11455 · Answer

When a large group sits on a straight line the subject distance from the center position to the sides varies by more than the distance from the first row to the last row. If they are standing in a rounded fashion, the distance is more uniform. Say, the group is taking a space of 2m depth and 12m wide - the distances will look like this:

Geometry

The worst case is 12.5-9 = 3.5meters of DOF.

At f=18mm you need to be 9 meters away - calculated on this: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/calc.htm

Here you can compute you DOF at a certain distance and focal length for your camera:

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

It turns out that you have the hyperfocal distance in this case - even if your lens has a magical F/1 (but you probably have more like 3.5 max aperture) you are looking at a 5meter deep DOF. Even if you went further away and zoomed in a bit (e.g. 35mm) you would still be looking at a much deeper DOF than you need.

This concludes that you are not having any DOF issues. It is just your lens that is only sharp in the center, especially if you shot it "wide open" at F/3.5-5 so you should find a nice prime instead that's sharp across the frame at F/4.

How can I photograph a very large group indoors and keep everyone sharp?

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