When I originally tried to shoot a team portrait for my daughter’s volleyball team, it just didn’t work out. The coach promised that we would get together in a few weeks, but I was skeptical. I was pretty convinced that the team portrait would never come together.

Yesterday, all the moons and planets aligned, and we got 20 of the 21  team members, the two coaches, and me in the same room. Six shots later, I have a team portrait.

1/50 sec, f/7.1 ISO 400

I’m reasonably pleased with the result. As a parent, I’m most disappointed by the fact that the team members aren’t in uniform. I’ve never seen a team portrait where the team members were in street clothes. Oh well. As a photographer, there are a lot of lessons learned for me. Stop reading now if you don’t want to see me beating myself up Tyler Durden style.

First comes the excuse-making:

• Team time in front of the camera: 4 minutes. The team wasn’t even in the room until I had less than 10 minutes before they had to head toward their buses.
• Though the coach and I had planned on me having 30 minutes with the team, they showed up with only 10 minutes to shoot, and the coach took the first 3-4 minutes reminiscing.

Now the lessons learned:

• I didn’t confirm details of where I was going to shoot them prior to my arrival. I had assumed I would do the shoot in the gymnasium/auditorium. When I got to the school, I learned that the basketball team would be in the gym for practice right at the end of my shoot time. Initially I thought I could cope with this conflict, and I started setting up to shoot in the gym. My dear wife convinced me otherwise, and now I think that was a wise decision–to not have to worry about basketballs hitting my gear as I was trying to tear down was an excellent thought. As a result, the shot was done in a dance studio, that fortunately, looks a lot like a gym.
• In my initial test shots, I noticed specular highlights on the wall that was to be the background. That was because the brick was glazed and shiny. I hoped it would be absorbed by the team, but I was wrong. I suspect it might have been alleviated with umbrellas, but I only had one (more on that below) and chose in the last minutes to not use it. The highlights are still visible in the final result, and it will probably bug me forever that I’m not good enough with photo editing tools to get rid of it.
• Prior to the shoot, I suspected that I needed additional lighting gear, but I didn’t want to borrow my friends gear again, and I didn’t feel like renting gear for a shot where I wasn’t getting paid. That probably isn’t the best attitude on my part–if I ever want to get paid (maybe, I’m still not sure) I need to treat every shoot as if I were getting paid. My unwillingness to use anything but my own gear resulted in a lower quality shot.
• I had flashes far camera left and far camera right. The flash on the left is under-powered compared with the one on the right, and it was my LumoPro LP120, set at 1/4 power. It would have taken 10 seconds to walk over to it and change it to 1/2 power. That would have reduced the shadows on the right side of the team.
• I don’t like the haphazardness of the first row: arms and legs all over the place, and my daughter looks 6 inches shorter than the rest because she is slouching. I needed to take more care with their poses.
• A couple of the kneeling folks in the middle row are slouching or leaning forward too far. I corrected one of them in a later shot, but by then the young women in the front row were starting to goof off. This is a better over-all shot despite the slouchers.
• The shot is a little fuzzier than I would like. That could have been helped by a) faster shutter, b) smaller aperture, or c) tripod. My tripod was being used as a light stand (see above about not borrowing gear), and changes in shutter and aperture would have reduced the ambient, accentuating the shadows. Not good for this kind of shot.

What I did right:

• The exposure and white balance look correct. Now some of that was helped with some tweaking in the digital negative (raw file), but I got it close enough in camera for the result to require only minor tweaks. The flashes were gelled with green to balance them toward fluorescent, which was my ambient, and camera white balance was set to fluorescent.
• The height of the rows look pretty decent. The tallest were in the front row, shortest in the middle row, remaining in the back row. It might have been better to put the shortest in back, and the middle height in the middle row, but there wasn’t much separation in height after I got the tallest ones on the floor.
• They are all smiling as much as their personalities allow.
• Their eyes are all open. This, however, was luck. I looked at the images on the back of the camera, but I doubt I zoomed enough to check the eyes.
• The back ground is about as clean as I could get it. There had been stuffed toys on the window sills in the background, but I moved them before the shoot. A couple were in this final shot right at the edge, but I was able to remove them in post-processing.

All in all, I gave myself the beating I think I deserve if I want to do better. I think the shot is pretty decent considering the constraints (4 minutes) and my experience (not too much). The next question is do I have the intestinal fortitude to put it in the Critique My Shot Forum to see what other photographers think?

Ah yes, I’m a glutton for punishment.