Perhaps you'd call it "courting the youth vote". If you were running for office, wouldn't you? We followed Chris Stolle, Candidate for VA House of Delegates to a Virginia Beach High School to capture images of him talking with students. After classes that day, the Republican Club hosted a Q&A session with the candidate.
I've shot these types of discussions before and love doing it. The students are so freakin' smart. Not only that, they're surprisingly (to me, anyway) aware of current events and local government issues. The candidates always seem to get caught a little of guard. They come in relaxed, thinking this will be a laid back discussion. They end up switching gears, going from "oh, this will be easy," to "these kids are just as smart as everyone else."
The only problem with these shoots is that eventually I start paying too much attention to what the students are saying, and not how they look (which is what the clients are paying me for.) Fortunately, there are enough other folks around (like Missi Sousa, the campaign manager, or Chris Jankowski, political advisor) looking for the occasional un-tucked shirt or slouching posture.
When I shot this, the only direction I gave the students was where to sit. Between questions/answers, we moved them around to different desks. This gave all the students a chance to be recognizable on camera and ask their own specific question of the candidate.
The side-story here is educational funding for the State of Virginia. Just like a lot of places in the Commonwealth, this high-school was very overcrowded. There were no less than 8 classroom trailers outside what looked like a vintage mid-80's main building. And this was in an affluent Virginia Beach suburb.
When I realized we were shooting in a classroom trailer, I worried about setting up the shot. It was an overcast day, threatening showers. Was any natural light getting into that trailer? Would it look like a real classroom? Would there be any students in there?
Fortunately, there were plenty of students and big windows on the two long walls, facing the other trailers. The weak diffused light from the windows combined with the overhead fluorescent fixtures to provide a soft fill light. My assistant, Sam Allen, set up off-camera strobes to the right of the candidate to bring up the overall light level in the room. My intention was to make our strobes resemble sunlight streaming through the windows on one side of the trailer. The strobes allowed us to shoot at a fast enough shutter speed to freeze action and keep depth of field (sharpness) on the candidates and students. Without the additional lighting, we would have had mushy, out of focus images.