Hi, Anna here! In our previous blog post, Filipe talked about our new collaboration with Capella Duriensis (in case you missed it, go check it right here). We’ll wait for you!
Today we want to show you how the group photo was achieved, with the help of a little behind the scenes video.

The concept

We wanted stay away from the traditional location group photo and do something slightly different. Besides, autumn had now set in, and scheduling a location shoot under the threat of rain could be a problem with such a large group (the gorgeous autumn colours weren’t even there yet, so not a lot to be gained anyway). So studio it is!

But how do you get 19 people in a group photo using only a small studio?

Getting it done

The answer to that question is actually a pretty simple one: you shoot pretty much every member one by one and merge everything later in Photoshop.

As long as the basic things are consistent from shot to shot, like lighting, framing and camera-to-subjects distance, everything should add up nicely in post without too many headaches.

Speaking of light – we wanted a nice, big, soft light feeling, but with some direction and “volume”.
Our weapon of choice? A huge 7-foot white reflective parabolic umbrella a couple of meters away and slightly to the left. Just what the doctor ordered.

The “making of”

So without further ado, here’s a short video of the sessions and the process we used to make this image:

(In case you’re wondering about the music: yes, that’s Capella Duriensis. We told you they were good.)

As you can see from the video, each individual photo (okay, we cheated and shot a few small groups 😉 ) was taken into Photoshop, masked out from the original background and composited into a bigger image that ended up being over 14,000 pixels wide – that’s a huge canvas to work with!

Once that was done and everyone was positioned correctly, each photo was then blended in with the others to create the illusion of a single photo.

The last step was to superimpose this composited photo into a new background, similar in colour to the one background we used to shoot the original photos. We had asked everyone to wear jeans or subtle tones, so the grey contributed to the highly muted, desaturated renaissance feel – highly appropriate, wouldn’t you say? 🙂

Putting the final image together did create a huge file – but we think the results are worth it:



Please feel free to ask leave us any comments or questions comments box below – we promise to respond to all comments.