A common photo opportunity for the amateur photographer is a group picture.  People, specially kids, have a natural tendency to have their picture taken.  And no occasion is complete without the attendees being photographed in groups, with the host, or in various activities.

Using manual SLR cameras, most of the shots are set and composed, to ensure that everyone is in the picture and that.  This usually results in a picture of people as if they were in a police lineup:  all of equal distance from the camera, looking in one direction and waiting for the shot (or flash).  And this is the reason why group pictures always look so formal.

Of course, there are workarounds to this.  With film-based cameras, it’s to use the manual setting, and to shoot when the

Increasingly, digital cameras have included face recognition software.  Embedded in the camera is a software which checks for faces in the field of view and ensures that the people in the picture are in focus.  This is a neat feature, though the implementation varies between camera brands and make.  Some cameras can only include up to 5 people, and though this is currently the baseline, expect that succeeding cameras will be able to frame more people.

One offshoot of this is that the photographer now takes more time framing the shot until all the people in the view finder (or LCD with Live View) are recognized by the software.  And again, depending on the software and camera, this is several seconds on top of the camera’s auto-focus function.

Face recognition software relieves the photographer of the job of making sure everyone is in focus.  This results in more dynamic pictures, with less formal and wacky poses, and more depth of field.  Depth of field is defined as the difference between the minimum and maximum distance that subjects are in focus.  This is a function of the aperture setting.  The higher the f-number, the deeper the depth of field is.  However, the higher the f-number is, the more light is needed.

Put another way, a wide-angle lens will have a better depth of field for a given f-number compared with a telephoto lens.  That’s because the wide-angle lens captures more light.  By the same token, for a film-based camera, the more sensitive the film (higher ISO-rating) the better depth of field you would get.  That being said, most lenses have depth of field markers which indicate the distances objects are in focus.

As a useful rule of thumb, to ensure that all the people are in focus, people should be between 10 and 15 feet away from the camera.  This will also make sure that the flash will reach the persons in the back and those in front don’t reflect too much of the flash.

This also serves as a useful workaround if you want to shoot fast without worrying if the shoot is blurred or not.  Whether the camera is a film-based of digital, and it doesn’t matter if it has face recognition software or not, set the camera on manual mode and shoot when the subject is within the prescribed distance.  Lag time between shots will also be minimized, allowing you to take the next shoot almost immediately.