It seems my photos from the recent concert were not too bad. This time, I was hired to take portrait shots of the complete orchestra for their website. In fact, it is only a small orchestra with 26 people who were there on that particular day. What made things a little difficult was the fact that we only had limited time as we had two squeeze the shoot in between two rehearsal sessions, leaving just one hour of time.

We wanted to show the musicians together with their instruments which meant that for most of them it would be half-length portraits. Only for the trombone players knee-length would be more appropriate. We decided to go for a monochrome background which after the shoot I would have liked at least a little brighter; maybe even a white background would have been good. You can also see my limited (i.e. virtually non-existing) knowledge of this type of photography in that I often placed the musicians too close to the background, throwing shadows. In a few cases that looks quite fine, but most of the time it doesn’t.

The lighting is pretty simple and allowed for a fast session without the need to modify anything between the different portraits. I used two monolights, the main light with a softbox and a fill light with a white umbrella. While this is certainly no specacular lighting, I think it worked quite well.

The portrait session was made with a Canon EOS 6D and an EF 85mm f/1.8 USM lens. The exposure was 1/125 second and ISO 200. I used f/8 to have the musicians as well as their instruments in focus. The photograph was edited in Adobe Lightroom. You can find this photo along with more portraits of this session and other photos of the same orchestra in my album Musikkapelle Wewer.