Clothing tip for group photos

What your subjects wear can greatly effect the overall quality of an image.  Not everyone is going to listen to you, but strongly encourage your clients to coordinate their clothing for group shots.  It is a pretty simple thing to do and your image WILL look a lot better.  It is also more likely to endure the test of time.  Simple, solid colors are best.  Take a look at some portraits from the 1970's if you don't believe me.  Here is a picture of my wife (second from the right) with her dad and siblings.

They are all wearing the same color shirts, and because the shirts are darker your attention is immediately drawn to their faces... which is what a portrait is all about.  They all wore long sleeves which is another plus.  Your eye is naturally drawn to the brighter parts of the image.  You can see how Kelly's forearms distract a little from the faces.  If everyone was in short sleeves you can imagine how distracting it would be and that the image would lose some of it's quality.

The ground sloped to the right and it might have looked better if I had had them reverse order, so that the taller two were on the downhill side of the frame.  That's something I can place in the "maybe next time" file that I keep stored in my head.  But then again, I kind of like the way the image composition slopes from left to right.  Switching their order may have evened out their heights and made the composition a little boring.

It was a sunny day in Florida.  To get rid of the strong shadows from the sun I had them move into the shade.  Simple... but effective.

Keep shooting!

Ryan