Family portrait with 18 persons

During the dark days of the winter here in the Netherlands our neighbor Victor asked me to take a family portrait for and with his parents. I made it difficult for myself to stick to outside portraiture because it was freezing cold. So first composing with jackets on, then take them off and make the picture quickly...

Here the result
 

 

How it's done...

Some things I took into consideration where 1. to photograph from a higher standpoint to get a better spread of people, 2. still I put everybody close to eachother 'grouped' in individual families and 3. used artificial light (flashes) to let them stand out of the background. A small aperture on a wide angle lens (35mm, F8) made the picture sharp from front to back. 

I needed some photoshop to blur the grass and background a bit. And also, to get 18 good expressions, I combined two almost identical images for this result.