Private event photography

There is a window at every private event when everyone is present, dressed, and has not yet been at the bar for two hours. It usually opens about forty-five minutes after the stated start time and lasts around twenty minutes. Naming that window in advance — and telling the people who need to be in the photographs that it exists — is the single decision that most affects whether the group shots happen at all. Left to find itself, it closes, and the group photograph gets taken at eleven o’clock with four people missing.

The rest is candid, which is the point of hiring someone rather than asking a cousin with a nice camera. Three hours of coverage means the photographer is present before the arrivals and still working through the speeches, and nobody in your family spends the evening holding a phone instead of talking to people.

Give the photographer a short list of who matters rather than a list of shots. At a sixtieth birthday the people who need to be in a frame with the person whose birthday it is are not obvious to a stranger in a room of eighty, and they are the photographs that get printed. Four names and a sentence about each is enough, and it takes two minutes to write.

Light is the thing that decides how a private event photographs, and it is usually decided months earlier by whoever booked the room. A venue with windows and lamps photographs warm; a function room with ceiling downlights photographs like a function room. Where the room is difficult, coverage leans on the moments and keeps the wide shots few. A hundred and twenty or more retouched photographs within five business days, a print release included, from $600.