Group photo – "Who Blinked?!"

Until digital cameras and Photoshop came along, ‘blinks’ were the scourge of the group photograph.

Nowadays, if you’ve taken a few captures of a group, it is possible to ‘fix’ blinks by playing plastic surgeon and replacing someone’s closed eyes in one picture with (the same person’s) open eyes from another.

The problem with this approach is that it takes a lot longer than just getting a blink-free shot in the first place.

Now, us pros know that more shots generally equal better insurance against problems of many kinds – hence the number one lie of photographers, “one more please”.

But what if you’re worried about annoying your group by parroting “one more” a few dozen times, and want to know the minimum number of shots needed to get a blink-free capture?

Well, fortunately science has come to the rescue. CSIRO physicist Dr Piers Barnes and writer Nic Svenson went to the trouble of mathematically working out how many captures you need for a given size group to get a 99% chance of a blink-free shot (and they even drew a pretty graph).

For their efforts, Barnes and Svenson were rewarded with a prestigous (?) Ig Nobel prize. Ig Nobels are awarded to scientists who do unusual research just like this.

Other recent award winners were Schwab & May for “why woodpeckers don’t get headaches“, and Halpern, Blake & Hildebrand for “why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard“.

If you haven’t already checked them out, you should: Improbable Research.

So how many exposures do you need to make to get that perfect shot? Well of course that depends on the size of the group… but if you can’t be bothered reading the orginal article (please, what is with you?), the rule of thumb is:

for groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there’s good light and two if the light’s bad

Good luck!