Shooting a group of people under bad lighting condition is a tricky job to do. I read one article about taking a group photo with 3 flashes in strobist.com, I wanted to try out the method explain by strobist. I has this golden opportunity when I and my wife were invited to attend a bloggers gathering in a local restaurant.
I used 2 flashes instead 3 as mentioned by strobist.com. Strobist explained that a cross lighting method should be adopted to provide a 3D-ish kind of group photo. Flash on camera left would positioned in such a way that the flash light would feather out so to provide a soft-box type of lighting, and the flash on camera right should be fired from behind the group for separation purpose. A third flash suppose to be fired from on camera axis with low power to provide some fill onto the crowd.
Since the flash from Sony camera's pop-up flash commander is visible under shutter speed of 1/250s (HSS speed for A700), I should make use of the flash fired from this pop-up commander, with shutter speed set at 1/200s, instead using a third flash as mentioned in strobist.com.
The result isn't that promising though. Although the flash from the pop-up acts as fill, but I feel that the flash isn't strong enough to bring up details of the shadow. Still, some faces are still in dark shadow. Perhaps I should use the third flash as advised by strobist. :p
