Archive for June, 2009

Original Image and Framed Print

Every year Xerox is a major sponsor for DND Family Days. DND hosts an annual carnival for the families of the Canadian Armed Forces at the Halifax Dockyards. The carnival includes fair rides, farm animals, displays, boat rides and more.

As part of our sponsorship we do free family portraits for the families of the forces personnel that attend the event. Over two days we did 1389 family portraits of ~4200 people. We always have lines up for the photos and we even had some come on saturday morning when it was raining. Many people comment on the photos did for them in previous years.

How We Did It

One of side of our booth is the “studio” and the other side is the processing area. I brought a backdrop from my home studio and we had two bails of hay for people to sit on as the event had a western theme this year. We also had some cowboy hats. Two Alien Bee AB800s with umbrellas provided the light and these were connected to my camera using Cybersync triggers. The Cybersyncs were very reliable and we didn’t have a single misfire.

Family Days Studio Setup

We used my Canon 50D with the 18-55mm F2.8 lens. I think every picture was sharp over the two days. Fast focusing is very important when shooting kids as sometimes you only have a fraction of second to catch the pose. Knowing the child’s name really helps to get their attention. The camera was tethered to a Macbook Pro using a USB cable and Canon’s EOS Utility. The EOS Utility generates a preview and this was displayed on a second monitor attached to the Macbook. Each image tranferred to the Macbook in 1-2 seconds and displayed automatically on the second monitor. This was a crowd pleaser!

The camera was set to medium resolution and high quality JPEGs. This was lots of resolution for a 8 1/2 x 11 print and everthing processed faster. All the camera settings were registered to custom function C1 and duplicated on C2. This made it very easy to restore the camera settings when inexperienced photograhers hit the wrong dial as we had several people shooting.

EOS Utility was writing the images to folder which we monitored using Adobe Bridge. This worked very well. When I was creating and testing the workflow I tried to use Lightroom but I encountered some limitations with Lightroom. It could automatically import images but everytime an image was imported it would interupt what anything else you were doing in Lightroom and this quicly become frustrating. I couldn’t set a default aspect ratio for cropping and I had to Export images and use a Photoshop Droplet (action) to create the frame. I decided to use Bridge and Photoshop.

Cropping Pictures on the Macbook Pro

Pictures were selected in Adobe Bridge and opened in Photoshop. Each image was cropped manually and then an action was run to size the image, add the frame and print two copies. We printed two copies as we received many requests for an extra copy for Grandma or someone else in the family. Additional copies were available on request. Of course all images are printed on a Xerox Phaser printer using Xerox Elite Silk 80lb cover.

Tecthered shooting was very efficient and we had no line ups for prints this year. We were able to do each photo session in 10-20 seconds and completed prints were done in 1-2 minutes. Of course we had line ups for photo sessions all day.

Summary

It was a great event and a lot of fun for everyone. It generated a lot of good PR for Xerox and I expect we will be back again next year to support our troops.

The Team - Dan Benoit, Korinne Maclellan and Myself