One of the activities I get to do each year is photograph the new crop of fresh faced interns for the program that my Wife Runs. It is always fun to watch these fresh faced youngsters arrive in Austin and then as the summer goes on, grow close together until the end of the program when its time to wrap up. As part of the wrap up, they get to travel to corporate headquarters (Wahoo) and present to the CEO (yikes) and as part of that preparation we take teams pictures. For the team pictures, I don't consider them to be interns, instead they are my client and I work with them accordingly to compose a team picture that truly sums up them as a team as well as the project that they worked on and presenting. And finally there is always the group photo, where again the focus is not about a staged/pose picture, but a photograph that captures the essence of the group.
Although this is the third year for the program, it was only last year that we decided to do group shots of them on the first day to capture that slightly awkward, not sure of each other or of Austin just yet, so that we can do a compare and contrast start of program to end of program.
We just finished doing the group pictures for the start of the 2017 program and it was fun actually trying to work with them on their first day.

The first group, it was "OK - show us just how existed you are to be in Austin!", that got an immediate reaction as you can see. Ultimately I had to merge 3 photos together because they were so active, no single picture was sufficient to show all 3 at their best, so why not take the best of each and bring them together (and yes she was able to jump that high).

For the second group I said "Well, that first group did well, hope you can match them?", "Nah, we're just gonna hang out and enjoy the warm evening, maybe get a beer afterwards" - can't argue with that.

The third group was a bit more of a challenge, a little more shy than the others perhaps, so moved them over to a different spot and tried to get them to relax "Come one now ... lets imagine we're taking a picture for an Album cover!", "What’s an Album cover?". Talk about feeling old...
Well once I got a picture that worked, I thought - why not play with the tones and saturation a little in order to turn it into an Album cover!

I liked that fact that dropping the saturation down, I got to the point where the only real hint of colour was found in the green dress, and in the red & white striped umbrella in the background. When desaturating like this, it is always a challenge to find the right balance between fading the colour and being dramatic, while not getting too washed out.

Hope you all like, and good luck - see you at the end of summer!