In recent weeks, I stepped out of my comfort zone of fine-art photography and accepted the opportunity to try my hand at event photography, with no pressure or raised expectations from clients.

I would like to thank Women In Tech North East, CyberNorth and CyberFirst North East for trusting me as official photographer role for their evening event and annual conferences respectively.

As I expected, there was a world of difference between the leisurely post-processing of individual fine-art images and the time and image intensive environment and heavy responsibilities that go with capturing the essence of an event in a way that others can use for marketing and social media purposes.

I think this is a primary reason I've kept away from full-time commercial photography, such as for weddings, portraits and products. Way too much accountability for my shoulders to carry if I have an off day, or equipment settings render poor results that can't be retaken. Qudos to those who are able to be successful in this line of work.

Anyway, I think the clients were happy with my results, and I couldn't help myself by bringing in some dynamic/risky shots into the mix, to satisfy my more creative urges. Some shots were taken as non-event personal purposes for some experimental art photography processing when I had time later.

One major insight I accepted for the first time, was that for event photography, I could see the reason for using Lightroom as the default processing tool instead of Photoshop. Using my clunky Photoshop skills, I had to first select which images to process, then crop, denoise, sharpen (in small batches), export on a large scale and with clients wanting to see the results asap. Something that would be much easier to do with Lightroom flows if involved in many such projects.

I'd be happy to try the occasional event photography project again, if offered the opportunity on a more commercial basis, but am mostly content in pursuing new fine-art photography projects and converting my "Two Tone Toon" printed media book about Newcastle, into smaller chapter-based ebooks for future sales online.


Some of my observations & lessons learned:
If possible, acquire some prior details about the venue and take into considerations such elements as the event's time of day, available lighting - e.g. will there be natural light, or hard artificial room lighting; both of which will influence default ISO and aperture settings as well as prioritising selection of lens - take note of potential primary viewpoints, e.g. for tripod and areas to avoid, to save time at the event itself

Ask the event host what kind of results they are looking for, e.g. mingling/networking candid shots, formal presentations detail (and do all presentation slides, if applicable, need to be captured "live"?). I found it helpful to review examples of similar past events to get an idea of how high the bar would be set for my own efforts!

From past experiences at formal corporate events, I would almost always be annoyed at the official photographer's intrusive style of capturing presenters as they spoke, and being a distraction as they moved from one part of the room to another in line-of-sight of the stage. I tried my best to blend into the background and not be a part of attendees' own shots of the event

Difficult choices on what lenses to bring - with only being in possession of one full-frame professional camera, I had to be careful not to waste time continuously switching to the best lens for the perfect scene-by-scene view (e.g. zoom in? wide-angle? nifty-fifty for best light capture?). If I had the luxury of a sherpa to help carry equipment, I'd probably have fallen into the trap of missing good shots with the lens currently on the camera, by swapping with one that could potentially take a "great" shot, and then possibly missing that one too

Ensure that event attendees are informed that event photography will be taking place and to shout up if they do not want to be included in images that will be made publicly available - if id/lanyards are used, ask organisers to issue a different coloured badge/lanyard to those not wishing to be photographed. This was implemented in one of the events, for security of id purposes

Be selective in which images to include for post-processing and not try to bring my own personality too much to the forefront, nor depict subjects in unflattering poses - I had to ensure that children at the evening event weren't captured

When taking candid shots, keep the shutter down for at least three images, to have a better chance of a usable photograph without eyes closed or doughnut making its way into a chasmic mouth

Indoors, if the camera lens/quality allows, make the ISO 400+ and worry about chromatic noise/aberrations in post-processing. I didn't mess about with any flash photography, but these might have been good for closer shots

If using a wide aperture (for better collection of light in darker surroundings), take time to focus on one subject area, and accept everything else around it will be more blurred (so use that advantageously to enhance the focal object, and you might also get lucky with peripheral bokeh)

Upfront, ask about timescales expected for final images, as these may be urgently needed to take advantage of marketing and social media "buzz". In the case of one of the conferences, I tried to first create a small summary batch of images that were ready for the next day or so, whilst working through the rest in a more strategic manner over the following few days