event photography

Choose better conference photography

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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

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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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Toronto Film Festival 2016

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Another ridiculously long post. If you’re not somehow connected to, or involved with, the Toronto International Film Festival then it might be better to skip this post. I’m just trying to reach a certain audience.

tl;dr:
• It took 41 years but Roy Thomson Hall finally got lights; they weren’t set up right. Red carpet made narrower. More advertising added. Photo pit made smaller and still left open to the rain. Most fans stuck far away from event. Publicists in the way.

• Princess of Wales Theatre still without lights at night. Still overcrowded. Publicists in the way.

• Press conferences are okay. Publicists occasionally in the way.

• The four-day street festival still a waste of time.

• From a photographer’s point of view, the Toronto Film Festival has improved very slowly over the past 41 years. Although some years, it regresses.

• From an onlooker’s point of view, the film festival is an overly big, confusing mess of films. It has lost sight of its purpose. A major overhaul is needed.

Reduce the numbers of venues to a handful. Cut the number of films by at least 50%. Eliminate many of the film categories. Have red carpets only at Roy Thomson and the Princess of Wales. Be more fan-friendly. (This year’s festival was 397 films, in 16 categories, scattered across 28 screens).
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Ministry of Photography

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cop21a

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

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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

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“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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Cut out the middleman

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If you’re a photographer who shoots corporate events like conferences and conventions, you may have noticed there are some online businesses that offer to connect you with customers. How nice of them.

Right now, one such European company is sending emails to photographers in Toronto, and apparently also in many other cities around the world, claiming that it has a customer with an urgent need for photo services in the photographer’s area.

If you ignore this email because of its generic nature or because it looks like spam, you’ll get more similar emails in the following weeks and months. The emails have a fake “unsubscribe” link that does nothing.

All these emails claim that this company has yet another customer with an immediate need for photography in your area. Of course, there is no customer. The oddly worded emails are often the same with maybe the name or date of the unidentified event changed.
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