Playtime: the project wrap-up

// April 17th, 2009 // Photography

The Background:

A few months ago I got the opportunity to do a large-scale shoot at a local playcentre.  Photographing just under 300 kids over five days presents some interesting challenges, not all of them obvious; on the bright side, getting to play with 300 kids is pretty darn fun!  It’s been a few weeks since I finished the shoot and I thought some of my readers might find it interesting what goes on during such a complex process.

It was pretty obvious before I’d even shot the first photo that good planning was going to be key; taking candids in a large playcentre isn’t easy.  Candid photography and portraiture can quickly go south if you don’t know what you’re doing – prior to shooting, I’d set the following goals:

  • An average of 20 high quality, compositionally varied shots per child.
  • No use of staged shots – only natural compositions.  Staged shots have their place, but they never show the person, only the staging.
  • Minimal ‘play-time interference’ – I was there as an observer, not a director, and the kids should still be having fun.  Like a good wedding shoot, my aim was to be as invisible as possible.  ’As possible’ being the ter, as a madman running around with a massive f/2.8 lens is … shall we say, rather obtrusive.
  • Processing turnaround and proofs delivery within seven working days.

I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy; ignoring the stuff I couldn’t predict, I already knew that:

  • Light quality was going to be bad.  Very bad – industrial lighting, variable levels of natural light throughout the day, and a two-storey high ceiling don’t make it easy to set a consistent white balance, let alone have enough light to freeze the motion of playing kids in flight.  As the day progressed, I knew from experience that I’d have to deal with rapidly changing light conditions from class to class.
  • Keeping the kids happy and relaxed was essential.  Kids freeze when they’re unsure or scared, and a stranger looming over them with a camera’s the best way to reduce a two-year-old to tears, not the greatest ‘natural’ shot to say the least.
  • Time was short.  Each class was only an hour long, and with the number of kids in each class, getting a 20 varied good shots of each kid was going to be a challenge.
  • The sheer volume of photos was going to create workflow and processing issues.  With roughly six classes a day on average and approximately eight kids in each class, I was projecting nearly 1,000 finalised photos a day.  Given the lighting conditions and the rapid subject motion, I estimated that I’d need at least double that to ensure an average of 20 sharp final shots, giving me a total of around 2,000 photos a day, or 250 an hour.  At around 12 meg a file, that’s around 3 gig an hour of data, or 24 gig a day.  Simply copying and crunching all that data was going to be a challenge, especially given I’d have minimal available time between days.

The Approach

To handle the above challenges, I ended up using two cameras; a D700 as my primary camera for its low-light capabilities and a backup D80, used for wide-angle photography during the short ‘playground’ play session without requiring a lens change.  I mentally broke each class up into multiple sessions where each session used a different focal length and composition to suit the action and class involvement.  

I couldn’t afford the time to change between more than a handful of lenses, so the main focal lengths I used were 50mm at f/1.8 to f/2.8 (to allow for a lower ISO due to the increased light availability as well as combat hand shake) and 100mm – 200mm at f/2.8.  I used the longer focal lengths to be ‘outside’ of the action and let the kids have fun, the main tradeoff being reduced light and increased hand shake, leading to a higher ISO / faster shutter speed with slightly increased noise levels (but still well withing acceptable limits thanks to the D700).

I also shot a close-up session within each class at approximately 28mm to provide compositional variation.  These were shot using the D80 backup camera; the tradeoff was higher noise, but the advantage was absolutely no setup time, something that was really key given the short periods of free play time the kids had.

I used multiple CF cards along with a laptop / USB drive backup system to stream photos off my inactive card onto a backed up system while I was shooting.  I intended on limiting my use of flash photography as much as possible, but ended up compromising on this somewhat from the second day on.  Bounce flash was next to useless given the high ceiling, so I mainly used flash to provide some weak fill where absolutely necessary.

Lessons Learned

  • As bad as you think the light’s going to be, it’ll be worse.  White balance was impossible to set with any consistency (even with the use of a grey card) and needed to be adjusted every time the cloud layer changed.  During the worst periods, this was as bad as four different white balance points within a single hour, all of which being significantly different to each other.  Even worse, the first two classes of each day consistently struggled to have enough light to maintain acceptable shutter speeds; only skill, luck, experience, and thinking on your feet can get you through this one.
  • Selecting and processing over 10,000 photos takes longer than you might expect.  A lot longer; while I met my 7 day turnaround for most people, the final two days stretched out to around 10 to 12.  While not the end of the world, the delay was frustrating (probably for me moreso than the parents).
  • Processing and coordinating shipped orders becomes increasingly complex as the number of prints increases.  This was something I hadn’t planned for and could have definitely been done better; there’s a big difference between dealing with individual portraiture / wedding shoots and dealing with over 200 individual orders.  I got some key learnings out of this one for next time, as well as a lot of ideas around how to streamline my ordering workflow; overall, while it was painful, it was invaluable.
  • Not everyone’s always easily identifiable.  Lots of parents prefer to have their kids photographed without nametags on (as their clothes are lovely).  While it does make very nice photos, it also make matching names to faces a lot more complex, leading to additional work and delays.
  • Communication is key.  I already knew this one, but it was good to see that it helped.  Communicating early and communicating often with everyone led to little additional time required doing one-off communications. 

What worked well?

  • Planning the shoots beforehand.  While in post-processing, I was regularly surprised at how much compositional variation I was able to get given the large number of kids, the limited class times, and the highly limited amount of time I had to spend with each child.  The planning worked!
  • Optimising the shooting workflow.  I spent quite a bit of time before the project planning out how to optimise my shooting / processing workflow.  This worked extremely well and in doing so, I’ve learned a lot of tricks that’ll help me in the future.  Overall, the best measure is that out of close to 300 kids, there were only two who I didn’t end up getting enough photos of and, while I can’t be one hundred percent sure, I’m pretty sure that least one of them disappeared for the majority of the class.
  • Pre-planning the communication and delivery process.  By putting a fair amount of thought into the entire process beforehand, it proved easily manageable even when complications set in.
  • The D700.  It’s rare that you can specifically point to equipment making the difference on an entire project but, in this case, it’s true.  The low light capabilities of the D700 made what would have otherwise been utterly impossible totally achievable.  And, that’s saying something. 

 What would I do differently next time?

  • Spend more time optimising my shipping workflow.  Packing, sorting, printing, and posting all takes time, and the scale of this project highlighted a number of inadequacies in my current system.  
  • Optimise my ordering system.  While it worked and was usable, it didn’t achieve one hundred percent success.  Usability was an issue for a small number of people, and some small language issues within the automated mailing system led to some ocassional confusion.  I don’t think there’s ever and end-state for this; I think it’s something that needs to constantly evolve and improve.  Having said that, I have ended up with specific changes that I can make that’ll improve things.
  • Drop the second camera as an active tool.  While it was useful, the benefits of using a second camera weren’t outweighed by the increase in noise and the difficulty of getting good exposures using an APS-C sensor-based camera.  The extra minute it’d take to swap lenses and reset white balance are worth the increase in image quality.  While nothing that came out of the D80 was necessarily bad, it was just simply too slow to catch the more energetic kids on the trampoline and in the swings. 
  • Pay closer attention to my suppliers.  One messed up order can waste hours.  And, it did.  I’m now weighing up the benefits of doing printing in-house because of the time I ended up having to spend sorting out a set of orders that were incorrectly printed.

Overall, it’s been a fun, interesting, and educational project, one that I’d happily do again.  Pending sorting a few final things out and time permitting, I might post some example shots at some stage.

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