How I Got TheShot #37 - Chamberlain College of Nursing Induction Shoot

Chamberlain College of Nursing has an annual induction ceremony that we have been invited to for capturing images of the night as well as getting portraits of the inductees into the Sigma Theta Tau society.

We wanted to run you through the night and give you some insight on how we got these shots.

Creative Process:

We had 2 parts to this job.  The first was to get some grab shots of the groups and then get individual portraits of all the inductees.  We ran this one pretty straight forward.

Location:

We were located inside a ballroom style area with very low ambient lighting levels.
Luckily, the walls and ceiling were white, so that helped us out a lot when were getting the grab shots during the event.  It also helped us out for the portraits as well.

Gear:

Nikon D700

Nikon 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5

Alien Bee B400
Nikon SB-26
Nikon SB-600
Umbrella Box
Radio Popper JrX Studio transmitter/receiver
Light stand
White Reflector

EXIF Info:

Shot in manual mode

Camera quality setting - JPG fine
exposure: 1/250, f/5.6, ISO 200(portraits), ISO 800-1600, f/3.5 to f/4.5, various shutter speeds(walk around)

(portraits)
Alien Bee power 1/4
SB-26 Power 1/8 power

(walk around)
SB-600 CLS -1EV

Lighting Setup:

For the walk around images, we used the Nikon SB-600.   I mentioned earlier about the walls and ceilings. We did not use straight flash, instead, we used bounce flash.  Either off the ceiling or we angled the flash head behind us and used the rear wall as a large light source.
In these situations, the room is too large to light the whole thing so you light what you can and let the rest of the ambient fall where it may.

Bounced the SB-600 off the wall behind me and into the forefront.  The rest of the room we "drag the shutter" and let it pull in the ambient.

For the portraits, we setup our lighting to stage left.  We had the AB400 in an umbrella box to the right of the subjects and at your standard 45 degree angle.  When we did the test shots, we were liking the light on the face, but we were not liking the dark shadows under the models chin.  We used a light filling technique where we place a round, white reflector on the floor and shot the SB-26 into it.

We had 36 portraits to get in a quick few minutes.  So we did not want to do anything too complicated   These portraits were done while the induction was going, so we did not want to have anything too disruptive.

Post Processing:
We did our standard portrait retouching using onOne Software's Perfect Portrait 8 beta.  We did a little blemish control and popped the eyes and teeth.  Nothing more.
We then did some basic contrast, sharpness, color boosting and then threw in a vignette to make the subjects stand out.