Corporate event coverage

An event posted about on the day it happens is an event; one posted about the following week is an archive. A preview set of around twenty edited images is delivered the same day, usually within a few hours of the keynote, which is what a social team actually needs and what almost no event photographer supplies. The full gallery of 150 or more follows within five business days.

Put the sponsors on the brief explicitly. Sponsor logos, branded step-and-repeats, signage and booth activity are what gets reported back to the people who paid for them, and they are the easiest thing on an event to under-shoot, precisely because nothing is happening in front of them and the room is quiet there. The same applies to the empty room before doors: the set-up shot is the one the venue and the production company both want and the one nobody remembers to ask for.

The frame most often missing from an event gallery is the audience. A photograph of a speaker on a stage proves somebody spoke; a photograph taken from behind the speaker looking out at four hundred faces proves somebody came, and that is the image the following year’s sponsorship deck is built on. It takes thirty seconds and a position agreed with the AV team beforehand, because it usually means standing somewhere the house lighting was not designed around.

Four hours of coverage from $950, with a commercial licence for company use. Larger venues frequently require an outside photographer to be credentialed in advance through the event organiser rather than simply arriving, and that is confirmed at booking — discovering it at a loading dock on the morning of a keynote is an expensive way to learn it.