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Professional Conference Photography

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A request came in this week for conference photography. This Toronto conference required the photographer to be onsite at an airport hotel for about 20 hours over two days. It seemed to be a routine event so I quoted my usual $1,800 per day or $3,600 for two days.

They turned me down. [Update: this conference, scheduled for late March, was cancelled due to the pandemic.]

I checked the hotel’s web site for the cost of its lowest priced coffee-break catering service for events ($18 per person). The conference web site showed that at least 245 people had registered. These numbers suggested that my $1,800 per day was about forty per cent the cost of a single coffee break ($4,400). Or to rephrase that, my two-day quote was $3,600 and the event’s estimated total cost for coffee and cookies was at least $17,000.
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By The Hour

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Another basketball photo because I seem to shoot a lot of basketball. This fisheye photo was shot mostly to amuse myself while waiting for the game to start.

Imagine if a restaurant charged for its meals based only on the time it takes to prepare the food. What if clothes were priced based only on the time it took to sew that piece of clothing? How about a grocery store that priced by the hour? For example, you get all the groceries you can grab for a rate of, say, $200/hour.
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Mugshot or Business Portrait

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A moment from the pre-game activities at a Toronto Raptors game a few days ago. The photo was taken with a 12mm fisheye lens and has nothing to do with this post.

Today I received a request from a small company to do a group photo. They wrote that their staff has changed and they needed an updated group photo of their seven employees.

The email said the group must be posed in a single row, everyone evenly spaced apart and no one overlapping the person next to them.
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Step by Step, Inch by Inch

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An old, partially submerged, iron scow (barge) is shown in June 2017 grounded in the Niagara River above the Horseshoe Falls. The boat had been lying on its side and lodged in this spot since 1918.

A couple weeks ago, the old iron scow stuck in the Niagara River above the falls made international news. The boat had been stuck in place since 1918 but a storm on October 31, 2019, dislodged it.

Most of the headlines were about the boat breaking free and moving closer to the edge of the Horseshoe Falls. All very dramatic. Niagara Falls . . . step by step, inch by inch:
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Accurately Remove Objects From Photos

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This shows a house before renovation. The vehicles are a visual distraction and one car covers a small portion of the home.

I do real estate photography for construction companies that build or renovate homes in the greater Toronto area. Often I photograph a home before construction has begun and then return weeks or months later to picture the finished work.
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Political Campaign Notes

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While photographing federal political leaders arriving for a debate in Gatineau, Quebec, on 11 October 2019, this was the view right behind the photo area. That’s a police boat on the Ottawa River.

This is another view-from-my-office photo.

It was obvious while photographing some of the federal election campaigns over the past two weeks that news media turnout has drastically dropped over the past three federal elections.
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Voting For A Business Headshot

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Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election campaign. Let’s take a look at the business headshots of the party leaders and all the candidates. (Note that political party web sites change from time to time especially with regard to information about their leader.)

If you have a few minutes, click on the links to each party’s candidate page and browse the portraits. Which ones do you like, which ones do you ignore? Why? Is it the lighting, the smile (or lack of), the eyes (or lack of eye contact), the background, or maybe something else? Which ones get your vote based only on their business portrait?

 

Liberal Party

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s headshot was cropped from a five-year-old picture. It uses window light and some type of reflector to give it a natural look. The image on the Liberal site is low resolution and was upsampled to give it visible blur and jpeg artifacting. Why would they do this?

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