A friend has a business doing natural-light pet portraits, and she was asked by her pet food store to do Grinch-themed pet portraits last year. She begged me to help her, as I'm crazy about lighting, and honestly she never would have survived without me. First, a description of what I used for that, and then a discussion on what you should use.

Canon 5DsR with 24-70/2.8 on a tripod and tethered. Pocket Wizards to remotely fire the camera. Consistency was THROUGH THE ROOF because of the tripod. I think we were at about 35mm focal length, and that was basically backed up against a shelf of product, with the backdrop as far away from us as possible within the confines of the store; probably 8'-10' away. I have tons of lights at my disposal, so I went with a four-light setup. Main light was a 3'x4.5' "stretched" hexagonal softbox on my left, vertical. Fill light was a 1x3 strip softbox, vertical. We didn't have much depth to light the background as an independent plane, so I cheated and used two background lights, each in a 1x6' strip softbox, vertical, firing almost at each other across the backdrop. We tethered so we could dump the best shots onto a thumb drive and hand it over ASAP. I think this link will lead you to the video they posted on Facebook - we had no idea they were taking a video at that point. I'm the balding guy in a blue shirt; you'll see the Pocket Wizard dangling from my left wrist as I walk around to get the doggies settled: https://www.facebook.com/pg/FriendsF...=page_internal - if it doesn't work, look up Friends Forever Pet Food - Dooley's Dog House on Facebook and just check their videos section.

For your event, you're mostly fine with what you've got. 6D and 17-50 is what I'd take. Tripod, absolutely, and any sort of remote button if you've got one. Lighting, either go with what you have (and a truckload of batteries; you'll never be able to recharge enough AAs to put many back into service, which is why I used to own almost 200 Eneloop AAs) or rent one simple 250-600ws studio monolight that is wall powered. You want a modeling light in it so you can confirm light positioning and see your space well. Settings wise, if you're going with speedlights, for me it'd be simple: f/5.6 for reasonable DoF, shutter speed at sync speed (1/160th for 6D I think, 1/200th for 7D2 I think), and then walk the ISO up from 100 until you have too much ambient, then back it down a smidge. Now set up the speedlights and hope they have enough power to do something for you; you want them as low as possible power-wise, so you get the quickest recycle time.

We shot tethered so we could hand over thumb drives right away. That was WORK for the two of us. She got the dogs out and the next dogs in while I RAPIDLY picked at least two best shots, drag/drop onto the thumb drive, eject, and get ready to shoot the next dogs (sometimes with people, sometimes not). I would scan eyeballs, and if I had enough looking towards the camera I'd shoot. Slow recycle time would have KILLED us; my pack could recycle in less than half a second and I still missed some shots because I saw a moment and fired but the lights weren't ready (that pack is designed so if it's not ready, it will not fire at all, so you either get a perfectly-lit shot or a black shot). Three people would have been better, though cozy. We shot 88 "families" in about 7 hours, and thankfully we were able to set up the night before. Would I do it again? Probably, but I'm certainly not going to go chasing down work like that.