The lighting set-up is very interesting. If you took a photo of yours, I'd love to see it.
I didn't take any pictures of the setup. It was relatively simple, though. I took a pair of 8'x4' foam core boards and taped one set of 8' edges together. I did this twice, so I had two pairs of boards. I stood these up and opened them so that I had the open side of the "V" shape pointing away from the subject. Behind me and the V's, I had a 9' roll of old beat up white paper. The lights were aimed into the V's. They diffused and bounced from there onto the white wall of paper where they were further diffused and bounced onto the subject.
If you look at the eyes or glasses of some of the pictures, you can see my in the catchlights. Here is an example:
looks interesting, since "an easy way to get even light across poorly posed groups quickly", was your goal, wouldn't it have been a lot less complicated to simply bounce 2 of your strobes{ alien bees} off of large umbrellas, one to each side of the camera..
It would have been less complicated to set up, but the result wouldn't have been as good and it would have meant more work. One difference would be that the light wouldn't have been as diffuse or broad. I could have gotten a similar effect by just pointing my lights at the background and dropping the V's, but they added a nice extra layer of diffusion.
The bigger problem is that it wouldn't have been consistent enough. I was dealing with people ranging from 24" to 76" tall with no time to change light heights in between. Even worse, some were wearing hats with broad rims. To get the lights low enough to illuminate under the brims of short subects would have meant having them too low for tall subjects. If I'd had a pair of giant octas on either side of me, that probably would have worked reasonably well, but I don't have a pair of giant octas. I only have two giant lights (an AB PLM used as a giant softbox and an 86" diffuser umbrella) and neither are that diffuse.
One issue I did run into was people in black costumes getting lost in the black background. I had my wife grab an AB400 with a background white shovel reflector on it to light the background when we had black costumed kids.
I have uploaded the first chunk of pictures
here. I rushed through as many as I could this morning. My camera settings were something like ISO 400, 1/160, f/8 to f/11 in manual mode on a 5DM2 with a 24-105 f/4 IS. My Lightroom settings were Lens Correction, default sharpening with the radius bumped to 1.3, +5 luminance noise reduction, +10 clarity, +10 vibrance, and post-crop vignetting. I occasionally through in some recovery. I made small crops on most shots.
