Group Photo Afterthoughts

(Group Photo: Roasted duck is the gourmet dish on almost every single table for celebration in the Chinese New Year)

Today, life is basically returning to normal after the Chinese New Year holiday.

There have been chances aplenty to take group photos (of people not ducks, mark you) during the Chinese New Year holiday when we paid visits to all the relatives and friends. Two things sprang to mine while I was reviewing the group photos.

A fun thought about group photo is: how many shots does it take to get an blink-free group photo? Physicist Dr Piers Barnes came up with a formula (1 - xt)ⁿ , which is so unpractical to a photographer at work that he simplied it into:

For a group photo of within 20 subjects, a blink-free photo can be obtained by the number of subjects divided by 3 (when the light condition is good) or 2 (if the light condition is bad).

This is still too complicated. My simplied and proven version is:

No matter how many subjects there are in a group photo, ask them to close their eyes and open only when you count to "cheese" at which time you will press the shutter.

OR

No matter how many subjects there are in a group photo, ask them to hold their eyes and press the shutter when you count to "two" (people tend to blink at "three" which I doubt is a reflex action)

Another thought which interests me is: for an indoor or outdoor environmental lighting group photo -- sometimes your subjects prefer not to be flashed -- is it possible to do an all-within-the-dynamic-range group photo disregardless the light distribution on the subjects? This brings a further question: will the HRD "computational photography" devices be available soon? How about the 3D bug-eyed lens? It has been over a year since the Abode Light Field prototype bug-eyed lens was reported, not long after which the Panasonic announced its research on HDR sensor. Provided the bug-lens lens is available, it could be fun playing with the refocus shift or perspective shift for a group photo. A HDR sensor will work miracle in difficult lighting situation (some discussion has it that the G1 can do similar tricks in boosting the ISO value in underexposed areas; I'm not quite sure about it). What fun that will be!

For those who are interested in the brief videos introducing the Abode Light Field lens and the Stanford's even more powerful 12,000-microlens lens respectively: