@Mghnickell wrote:
In answer to diverhank's first question , apparently I had it on landscape mode which I guess is an auto feature instead of manually setting my aperture, ISO and shutter speed. Should I manually set this info instead of relying on the camera to make the corrections for me? In answer to you second question,. The people that are in the photo booth either get right on top of the camera or they stand back but don't stand still. I was reading up on the "exposure triangle" last night and saw that tweeking your settings can correct for a little movement. Did I interpret that correctly? The focal length is approximately 4 feet so when they crowd camera it goes seriously out of focus
Thank you for the info. Now I feel I have enough info to give you a half-way decent advice (maybe :)).
For a photobooth environment, you should definitely use a Manual setting and not leave it up to the camera system which can be easily fooled.
1. You should definitely use the Alien Bee...you just need to control it so the light output is not excessive (overexposing your picture). This will give you plenty of light to work your settings which will solve lots of other problems.
2. Set the camera to M mode.
3. Set your ISO to some value. For photobooth type quality, I'd set ISO to 800...This will give me flexibility in other two settings without harming the quality of the prints that much. You can vary ISO to your liking, of course.
4. Your camera/lens combo has something called a Minimum Focus Distance so you have to control the environment so the people cannot get too close to the camera...otherwise everything will be blurred. Best is to move the camera back enough behind a glass panel so people can stick their faces right up to the panel without being blurred.
5. I'd set the MF (manual focus) on the lens,manually focus to a spot a couple feet off the glass panel (where people will most likely be) and set the aperture (Av) to something like f/8 or higher. This way your depth of field will be ample no matter where people may end up with.
6. Set your shutter speed (Tv) to 1/200 or faster if your Alien Bee can do high speed sync. This way people moving will not be as blurred.
7. With my proposed setting, there is no way you can get away without using flash/strobe like the Alien Bee. The key now is that once you manually set Av, Tv and ISO, the required amount of light is fixed. You need to set the Alien Bee to manual and adjust the intensity until the faces are properly exposed.
8. If you have ambient light in the booth, you might want to set White Balance to degrees Kelvin. Tweak it so the color looks the best.
8. Tweak the settings until things look perfect. This is a lot easier than taking pictures of people mingling in a wedding...everything in a booth can be controlled.
