"Cabo Friends"

"Cabo Friends"
©David A. Ziser

This image was made during our Help-Portrait session on Saturday  in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico. At the end of the session, we arranged this large group photograph of all the children with all of us. From the looks of all the expressions you see in this photograph its hard to tell who was having the best time - the photographers or those who were being photographed. Needless to say, it was a great experience and I'm sure we’ll be offering to do it again next year.

You can see Kent on the left, his wife Sarah is next to LaDawn. Cindy and Ralph in front row. And Donna and Elsa, the church missionaries, in back row.

Lighting was pretty simple – Paul Buff Einstein flash at half power shooting through my 42 inches Zumbrella camera right. The strobe output was balanced to be about one stop brighter than the ambient light. That was just enough to create the detail, depth, definition, and added dimension to the scene that we wanted.

The final image was tweaked in Lightroom3 to bring up the shadow density just slightly. I also added a gradient at the bottom of the image to tone down the bright desert reflections in that part of the image. I added the final “Color Priority” vignette to give us the final result.

Camera specs: Canon 5D Mark II fitted with 70–200 MM IS lens at 200 MM, F7.1 at 1/250 of second, ISO 400. Enjoy! – David