Planned months in ahead to ensure that every­body would be there, today was the day for the group pic­ture of my col­leagues from the Sys­tems Bio­logy group here at the Hamilton. Of course, not every­one was there, but that miss­ing per­son will be edited into the pic­ture (if all goes well) at the top right.

As the weather report prom­ised, the weather wasn’t going to play along nicely; in typ­ical Irish fash­ion it was, in fact, buck­et­ing down. Hence, the pic­ture had to be taken inside. But that was a won­der­ful oppor­tun­ity to get a slightly more inter­est­ing shot as com­pared to the stand­ard, bor­ing group pho­tos out­side in front of the institute’s logo.

So I got every­one to come into the sem­inar room where I had put up a chair on a table so that I could be high up above every­one. After arran­ging them accord­ing to their height, I asked every­one to bunch in as much as pos­sible (the num­ber one tip for group shots!) and shot with a wide angle focal length down on them, boun­cing the flash off the ceil­ing. The pic­ture turned out exactly how I had pre-​visualised it this morn­ing, brush­ing my teeth.

Again, for group pho­tos you 1) want to get people as close as pos­sible together (almost uncom­fort­ably close in real life, but it won’t look like it on the photo!). This not only makes the group look more like a group rather than loosely assemble indi­vidu­als, but also adds a small bit of fun to the whole action. 2) you want to tell people clearly and expli­citly to look dir­ectly into the cam­era, and nowhere else. If there are other people around you, send them away, or people will inev­it­ably get dis­trac­ted and not look into the cam­era. 3) take at least (!) three pho­tos or more, because you will always have someone with eyes closed at the exact moment you release the shut­ter. Hav­ing sev­eral pho­tos allows you then to clone some pairs of eyes between pho­tos so that every­one can have theirs open in the final image :-)