Look at the following pairs of photos taken at some Toronto business conferences. In each pair, one picture was shot by an employee with a cell phone and the other made by a professional photographer. Can you tell which is which?
Splitting a Photographer
Splitting Time
Sometimes a photographer might be asked to split up a work day into non-consecutive hours. This can happen with weddings, business conferences and other full-day events where the customer wants the photographer to cover only certain parts of the event. The customer usually expects the photographer not to charge for any downtime.
For example:
• A bride might want the photographer to cover her afternoon wedding ceremony from 1:00pm to 2:30pm and the evening dinner from 6:00pm to 10:00pm. The photographer would then have a 3-1/2 hour split in their day.
• A business conference organizer might want the photographer to cover the opening speeches from 9:00am to 10:30am, a keynote presentation from 1:00pm to 2:00pm and an evening reception from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. In this case, the photographer has two blocks of downtime.
Choose better conference photography
When your company is planning a business conference, workshop or similar event, the question of photography may come up. Conference photography is important because it can be used for your social media, a post-event newsletter, a press release, your annual report and for marketing next year’s event.
You might think that you can get an employee to do the photography because they have a cell phone camera. But if you decide to go this route instead of hiring a professional photographer, don’t pat yourself on the back.
Here’s why hiring a professional photographer is always better:
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Business Headshots at Conferences
Are you planning a business conference, convention or other similar corporate event? Would you like to add more value?
At your next conference or convention, arrange to have a business portrait photo studio at your venue. Conference-goers could then get a new business headshot while they’re at your event.
This is not to be confused with those photo booths you might see at parties and other social events. A business portrait studio has no silly props, no crazy backgrounds. It’s a no-nonsense, business photo studio with photographer, editor and makeup artist. Conference delegates would get a first-rate, professional business headshot.
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Ministry of Photography
Opening day at the COP21 Summit in Paris, France, 29 November 2015.
These conference photos were shot by France’s Ministère de l’Environnement, de l’Energie et de la Mer (MEDDE) photographer. Unlike Canada, these French government photos were put into the public domain.
Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) is being criticized for paying a photographer $6,662 to take pictures of its minister and her staff while they were in Paris for the COP21 climate summit late last year. [The French government’s COP21 site.]
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Toronto Conference Photography
A very long post with some suggestions for photographers planning on shooting business conferences, conventions and other similar corporate events. To save you time, there’s nothing here about cameras, lenses or how to take pictures.
Before the event
• Corporate events want a dependable, well-mannered, nicely dressed photographer who can produce decent pictures. They don’t want a photographer who produces wildly artistic images, always tilts their camera at a 45° angle or who can’t expose properly.
You have to know what the “bread and butter” pictures are and how to get them. Sure, go ahead and include some creative pictures but always make sure you have the expected pictures.
• You are *not* the most important person at the event. The food person carrying the tray of chicken skewers is more important and more popular than you. The people who paid hundreds of dollars to attend the conference are more important than you.
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Next-day photo delivery
“And we need the pictures delivered the next day!!!”
Sometimes an event such as a business conference will want finished pictures delivered the day after the event. Certainly it’s no problem to deliver a handful of images the same or following day if the event needs them for a press release or its social media. But when a day-long event expects hundreds of pictures to be delivered the next day, or even the next morning, then there’s going to be a problem.
Let’s do some simple arithmetic. If you’re expecting 100 finished pictures and the photographer spends a minimal five minutes per image then that’s 500 minutes, just over eight hours, of non-stop work. If you’re expecting 200 or 300 photos then that can easily amount to at least two or three days of work.
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