As they’ve been down the aisle together before, they didn’t want a ceremony filled with pomp and circumstance but rather a fun and relaxed celebration spent with some of their closest friends and family in pleasant surroundings – and with plenty of food and drink to go around!

Val must have been practicing her Sun-Salutations before the big day as the weather was uncharacteristically glorious (for March in Newcastle) and really made it easy to enjoy the beautiful country surroundings and decadent interiors of Close House.

Total Beauty and Sherlocks Hair of Hexham were responsible for making sure the bride was at her best. Val wore a beautiful silver and taupe outfit, which she found at local boutique, Panache in Ponteland and she carried a bouquet of pink roses (by Maureen of Gosforth).  Larry wore a suit and tie (because that’s what men wear at these things).

In keeping with the light-hearted mood of their civil ceremony, they chose some quirky songs well suited to a second wedding, including “Let’s hang on to what we’ve got” by Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons, “Mamma Mia” by Abba and Glibert O’Sullivan’s “Matrimony”, which accompanies one of the slide shows below, as well as some upbeat contemporary songs such as “Valerie” (of course) by Amy Winehouse and “One Day Like This” by Elbow.

Larry chose two best men; schoolfriend Mal and work colleague Dave (which meant he got double the roasting when it was time for the speeches). The room where the ceremony was held was beautifully decorated and bathed in sunlight. Val was walked down the aisle by her friend ‘Chuck’ and there were readings from Larry’s Daughter, Laura,  and Mal’s Daughter Helen. Dave’s son (and budding actor) Patrick played the role of ring bearer.

Everything went off without a hitch… well, that is if you discount the fact that they did actually get ‘hitched’ and overlook the part where Larry fumbled the ring… *ahem* … moving swiftly on.

After enjoying cocktails and canapes in the sun, a three course meal with the speeches and the cake cutting followed. Larry’s speech had everyone laughing – and Val blushing – as he gave her a right roasting but Val got her own back with her speech, accompanied with props including long-johns and headache tablets (sorry Larry, no “nuptials” for you!) – in any case, Val was only there for the cake really.

Did I mention Val is a self-confessed cake monster? I probably should have because that explains the three tiered vanilla, chocolate and fruit cake; for the girl who wants to have her cake and eat it! In the slideshow below, you can see Val wielding the cake knife in an attempt to keep the whole thing to herself… it was shared amongst everyone eventually – but that was probably just keeping up appearances for the camera

The celebrations (that’s posh for ‘consumption of alcohol’) went on until the sun was well and truly gone and bacon sarnies were supplied at 11pm for those hardcore enough to keep going!

Below are two slideshows, one which is representative of the album presentation I created and the other, longer, one has all the best images arranged in roughly chronological order (they’re best viewed at 1080p if your data connection allows it and in full screen mode, otherwise they look quite fuzzy (use the gear icon to change the resolution settings). I’ve also included some of my favourite pictures from the day.

Enjoy.

If you were at Val and Larry’s wedding and would like to buy prints or purchase a DVD of the slideshows, you can contact me here or use the details in the page footer.

Strictly speaking, I’m not a wedding photographer but if you’re looking to hire a photographer for your wedding and you like my style, then please use my contact form for information on my rates and availability.

Like most photographers, a conference photographer must have a good eye for composition. Like any corporate event photographer, a conference photographer must be able to predict when will be the best moment to press the shutter.

There are however, a few more subtle skills and personality traits that are necessary if you truly want to become a great conference photographer.

Astronaut Tim Peake at UK Space Conference 2011

The first of these is curiosity and a taste for knowledge; I love photographing conferences because I always come away having learned something new:

• At the Datacenter Dynamnics conference, I learned all about how server clusters are cooled and the challenges such an industry faces to become carbon neutral.
• At the IABSE-IASS symposium, I learned all about the difficulty maintaining the Forth Road Bridge and I learned about the life and work of Heinz Isler – a pioneer of organic shapes and shell structures in architecture and engineering.
• When I photographed the UK Space conference, I learned how much of a role British industry plays in space technology and I learned how robust the industry is even in the face of a recession – because space-tech is the future (I also saw some cool concept ideas for space tourism planes and met Tim Peake – an astronaut who is currently spending 6 months on the International Space Station!).

My point is; I take more than just a wage from each assignment. If I wasn’t the sort of person who loved learning new things – even things completely unrelated to my profession – then I would spend more time struggling to stay awake than focusing on getting the shot! After all, you usually find yourself in a warm, darkened room, more often than not with a less-than-engaging speaker, whose voice inevitably has a disturbingly soporific effect.

I often travel from Newcastle in the evening or early morning to a conference center in London or Birmingham and have to shoot all day having had little sleep and less to eat, so I rely on my natural inquisitiveness to keep me awake and interested. You must at all times be respectful – and snoring away in the front row won’t cut it!

You also have to be a patient person. This is a common trait amongst photographers in general but less so amongst event photographers. On a lot of shoots, the photographer is the most important person, even at weddings a good photographer often fills the role of master of ceremonies; directing the pace and setting the tone. This is never the case when it comes to conference photography.

Typically, there are a number of rooms where audiences gather to hear a speaker; and more often than not there are a number of speakers presenting on each topic. Your job as photographer is to capture a couple of good shots of each speaker in each room. This means you’ll be constantly nipping in and out and you’ll be acutely aware that any time spent photographing one speaker in one room, is time taken away from another speaker in one of the other rooms.

Because of this you need to be organized (hopefully you’ll have been given a good brief) and you also need to be patient. The reason I say this is because I find, in most cases, that when you enter the room with your conspicuous looking telephoto lens and hustle your way to a front row, the speaker will become nervous and will start to pay more attention to their cue-cards/laptop – or worse, the slideshow behind them – than to their audience.

This is anathema for you because it means you can only get shots of the speaker looking like they’re asleep at the podium or photographs of the back of their head.

So, you have to learn to put your camera down and listen to the speaker. Let your curiosity have the forefront, take some time to show interest – as a human being – in what’s being said and wait patiently for the speaker to get comfortable with your presence and relax before you pick up your camera.

This is hard to do when you know there are currently x-amount of speakers holding sessions in other rooms – and you’re supposed to get round them all in time – but it’s necessary if you want to maximize the amount of useable shots you get. As a bonus, shooting less means you’re distracting the audience less too.

This brings me to my final personality trait, which I’ve touched on already: respect. When photographing a conference, you have to bear in mind that no one is there to see you. Your role is important but it’s far more important that the handover between speakers is timely and efficient, that the delegates in the audience can see and hear without being distracted and that nobody feels your presence is a burden.

This means you have to try to blend into the background and stay out of people’s way – which is difficult to do when you’re sat at the front with a geet big camera and a bright flash! It means that you have to enter a room quietly during a natural lull in the speech and that you have to exit in the same manner.

It also means you don’t get to show frustration if it’s taking longer than you hoped to get a good shot of a certain speaker and that, if asked, you will leave immediately whether you got the shot or not (it does sometimes happen that a speaker will ask you not to photograph them. They tend to do it in a way that implies that you are vermin – but you just have to move on. Don’t take it personal). There’s no room for a photographer’s ego when it comes to photographing conferences.

Techniques:

Okay, now onto the nuts and bolts. I bet you thought we’d never make it here! In truth, this is the easy part but it’s no good knowing this if you haven’t got that other stuff down.

Framing: – Most conferences have branding somewhere or other. It’s usually on the front of the podium but sometimes it’s on a back board or a TV/banner in the background as well. It should go without saying that you need to get that in the shot: the events or PR company that hired you, want images that show the speaker was talking at their event. By all means get some close-ups of the speaker if they’re well known in their industry or are particularly interesting to watch but make sure you also have plenty good shots with the branding in.

This is okay occasionally:

The branding is lost in this close-up.

But this is better:

Both sets of branding are captured without losing the speaker.

Sometimes the speaker will move away from the podium and spend more time at the front of the stage. In cases like this, you can wait until one of their slides (hopefully being shown in the background) accurately communicates what they’re talk is about and use that to substitute for the branding. Alternatively, you can experiment with some more dynamic framing angles (it’s always nice to give your client a broad choice of images, so this kind of experimenting is useful anyway).

Here the slide clearly shows that the topic of conversation is Heinz Isler and his concrete shell structures.

The branding was so big in the background at this conference that I had to tilt the camera to fit it all in and create an interesting composition.

Eye Contact: – You’ll notice in all of these shots that you can see the speakers’ eyes: I’ve waited for them to look out at the audience before taking the shot. This is essential in order to make an engaging image but it’s easier said than done!

As I’ve already alluded to, most speakers are not performers and often they’re simply not used to presenting a conference. This can mean they spend an awful lot of time with their eyes pointed downward or turned toward their slide projections. For you, the photographer, this means you have to set your focus and your framing, then hold the camera in position (for what will feel like forever) and hit the shutter just as your target raises their eyes toward the audience.

Yes, you will find that your arms ache. Yes, you will find that even with the best preparation, the look is so fleeting that you get another blink shot or an unattractive expression. Yes, it’s tempting to switch the camera into continuous mode and machine-gun the speaker until you get a good shot. No, that’s really not a good idea – hence the patience I mentioned earlier!

Blink shots do happen. You just have to keep on shooting!

After 20mins looking at the back of a speaker's head, you will be tempted to shoot as soon as you see the tips of their nose!

The problem is compounded when you’re shooting speakers on a panel. You may be focused on eye contact from the person speaking but what about others at the table? You have to keep an eye on the whole scene in order to get a shot with no-one blinking and with appropriate branding.

This shot has no branding, poor framing and one of the subjects looks like he's sleeping!

Sometimes you’re cornered into shots like these because the room sets are never laid out with the photographer in mind and because your subject(s) simply aren’t camera trained. However, it’s best to try to work around it and avoid clicking the shutter/setting the flash off until you have a good shot in the viewfinder.

Glasses: – The more observant amongst you will have noticed that a lot of these speakers wear glasses. That’s something to consider because you don’t want your flash to flare off their glasses and ruin all chance of eye contact. It’s all about angles; remember your GCSE physics? Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection? I must admit, I’ve never had any trouble with this because I use the Demb Flash Diffuser, which allows me to control the angle at which the light is bounced.

In fairness, it’s usually only a problem when you’re shooting smaller conferences and you don’t have much room to change your position. It’s simply a case of trial and error regarding the angle and power of your flash in order to fix the problem – needless to say, you should rarely ever need to point a naked flash directly at your subject.

Settings:

Typically, you’ll be using a mid/long range zoom to get the desired framing. I find that my Canon L-series 24-105mm IS f/4 lens is suitable for most occasions and the L-series 70-200mm IS f/2.8 comes out for the bigger (or darker) events, where there is more of a space between the stage set and the audience. Image stabilization lenses are important here, it’s definitely worth spending the extra money to get that extra few stops.

In most cases, you’ll be in a dimly lit room and, whilst the speaker is well lit by comparison, in reality, there’s not a lot of light to play with.

Because you’re using a telephoto, you need to keep the shutter speed reasonably high. This depends entirely on how steady you are (assisted, hopefully, by a good quality image stabilized lens). I find I need to shoot between 1/50th and 1/80th of a second to ensure decent sharpness at maximum zoom (depending on the lens).

Also, because the branding is usually on a different plain than the speaker; you need to choose the right aperture to get enough depth of field. Higher is better: f/8 would be ideal on my (full frame) camera but you can get away with f/5.6 on smaller sensor cameras. In fact, I often have to open up to as wide as f/5.0 to make best use of the available light (which is fine as long as the branding is still readable).

Sometimes the speaker is lit adequately enough to be able to avoid using flash (although, in these cases, you’ll need to choose a faster shutter speed to freeze the action) and if that is the case, then go with it – the flash is a distraction best avoided when possible. Most of the time, however, you will need to ping in a little bit of flash, even if it’s just to help the camera with the white balance (I usually leave it on auto white balance unless there is a really strong colour cast to the light).

I try to keep the flash power as low as possible – usually 1/8 +/- a few EV increments – and use the Demb attachment to bounce the light toward the subject. I know many photographers who use a Stofen diffuser, angle the flash at about 45 degrees and leave it on E-TTL (automatic) mode, using the EV sliders when necessary. Me, I’m a control freak and I like to know how the shot is going to turn out before I press the shutter – but it’s not really a requirement, especially if you have a good digital LCD screen on your camera, like the one on the 5D MkII, so just play around and find out what works best for you.

I don’t like to recommend using high ISO but in this case, the aperture and shutter speeds you’re likely to be using, combined with the lighting, usually means you have no choice. My Canon 5D MKII has great high ISO performance and I tend to shoot between ISO 800-1000.

Obviously, these settings are subject to your tastes – and the available light – but as a good starting point, you’re looking at an aperture of f/5.6, shutter at 1/80th, flash at 1/8th and ISO at 800.

Daylight: – Sometimes you’ll find yourself shooting a smaller conference or a break-out session in a room with large windows and lots of natural light. This is great because you can bring your ISO down and turn off your flash but often a side effect is that the speakers’ slide projections are bleached out in your shot. It doesn’t matter so much if your speaker is standing near some good branding but if you have a ‘wanderer’, then try upping your shutter speed to capture the slides and adding a ping of flash, carefully directed at your subject, to even the exposure.

We want to avoid this (shot at standard settings ISO1000)

And aim more for this (shot at ISO500 and a slightly faster shutter speed)

Getting the whole room: – If the room is busy, i.e. the seats are full, then your client will want pictures to that effect. A good opportunity to do this is to wait for the end of a speech and get a shot of everyone clapping and smiling. These are always appreciated but the downside is, there’s usually no branding at the back of the room, so when you shoot into the crowd it could be any crowd anywhere!

Your client will appreciate shots of full audiences clapping (and preferably smiling) but where's the branding?!

For this reason, it’s always a good idea to get some shots from the back of the room as well. Switch to a wide lens (I use the Canon L 17-40mm f/4), find a spare chair to stand on so you can get a good overview, remove any diffusers from your flash and crank the power up to 1/2 (or higher if it’s a particularly big/dark room) and angle it at around 45 degrees, aiming to bounce it off the ceiling and down over the crowd.

This takes a bit of practice. You’re basically using the ceiling as a diffuser but you don’t want to get a bright ceiling in the shot as it will distract attention away from everything else. So you need to get up high, angle the flash to the ceiling and the camera down toward the room. Remember to get the stage and the branding in shot and preferably in focus too!

Your next challenge is avoiding hotspots; where the light hasn’t diffused evenly and is brighter at the front of the shot, or where the light is bouncing off bald heads in the audience and attracting attention to the wrong area of the image.

It’s largely a matter of playing with the angle and strength of your flash, although I do find that the Demb flip-it helps because I can fit it to the front of the flash and use it to flag the light, making sure I don’t cast any harsh shadows or create any hotspots.

This shot suffers from too much ceiling, hot spots and the stage is too small to get the branding.

This is slightly better but the sloping nature of the ceiling means I should probably have shot from further down the stairs.

This is cleaner but the bright white ceiling is distracting and will need to be cropped out.

This is what we're aiming for: the flash is evenly diffused and the ceiling is hidden (mostly).

What should I charge?

I generally advocate charging by the image or by the project when it comes to photography. Charging by the hour turns you into a wage slave and simply doesn’t accurately reflect the value of the image to the client, nor take into account what sort of usage license you want to permit.

Corporate event photography, however, is a little different. You’re not creating art, the images are virtually useless to anyone other than the client and conference organisers have enough stress on their plate without having to deal with an anally retentive photographer; so make it easy for them to hire you by giving them day rates, half-day rates and standard travel/accomodation charges.

I won’t go into what your day rate etc should be for this type of work but bear in mind that you’ll often be expected to be there for more than 8hrs a day and that you will have a ton of editing to do afterwards (even if your technique is spot on, there’s still hundreds, perhaps thousands, of images to sort through, crop and colour correct when you get home), so don’t undervalue yourself and don’t be afraid to ask for what you’re worth.

If you need help on choosing how to set your rates, the Newcaslte photography collective I’m part of – Freelance North Photography – has some posts on the blog there that may help. Bish has written one that talks in general about what to charge as a photographer and I’ve written one outlining five different methods you could use to guide your decision making process.

Conclusion:

So, that covers the basics of conference photography. In summary, it’s a fairly simple task of choosing the right framing to include branding and then waiting for the speaker to raise their eyes toward the audience. However, you will be expected to shoot a bunch of different rooms and different speakers simultaneously, you’ll find yourself photographing in mixed lighting conditions, there’ll be informal ‘breakout sessions’ in smaller rooms that you’ll need to cover too and you need to provide a range of different angles and viewpoints, so that your client has a choice of images for different uses.

You’ll need to do all of this while remaining discreet, patient and alert, so it takes a certain personality type to really enjoy and excel at conference photography.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to use the comment box below. I realise I’ve used more bad example photographs than good ones, so I’ll leave you with a few more good shots to check your results against. And remember, if you know someone who is looking for a professional conference photographer, then please mention me or have them contact me, especially if it’s an event located in Newcastle or the North East where I’m based (although I do frequently travel to London, Manchester and Birmingham too).

For the record, it’s not always the best idea to hire a professional. We all started out as enthusiasts and proved our ground shooting for friends and family or picking up low budget jobs. There are some gigs that are simply better suited for your Uncle Steve or to that friend of a friend who’s studying photography at college. And then there are some jobs where you’re just not sure whether to fawk out for a pro or not.

This post is aimed at helping you make the best decision for your needs.

Okay, so when shouldn’t I use a Pro?

Sometimes the job just isn’t all that important: maybe its a family get together and capturing some of the moments would be a nice idea but it isn’t really essential. You’re already worn out booking the venue and making sure everybody’s travel arrangements are sorted out and you don’t want to have to search for a good photographer within your budget on top of all that.

In that case it might be better all round to ask Uncle Steve if he wouldn’t mind bringing the DSLR he got for Christmas to the gathering.

Sometimes you just don’t have the money for a professional photographer: maybe you’re just starting a new business and would like a photographer to attend the launch event but you’re already cutting your budget close to the bone and you have no guarantee that the business will take off. A professional has to charge a certain amount because they have their own business overheads to consider.

A student or enthusiastic friend however… they don’t need to charge as much and if they’re halfway decent you should still get some shots that you can use on your blog or post on Facebook etc

I see. And when is it important to hire a Pro Shooter?

Well, its important to hire a professional when it’s essential to get the shots, when you need consistency and guaranteed results, when you need someone who can interpret a loosely formed idea and turn it into an amazing image and/or when the photographs need to be taken in difficult lighting situations. There are many more situations when a pro is the best choice (most of them obvious) but those are the aspects you need to look at if you’re unsure.

If you’re having a party in a nightclub and you want some really good shots of your guests, then you probably need a professional; the mixed lighting is difficult to work with if you don’t know the craft and an enthusiast may well deliver pictures of white faces (bleached out by the flash) against a black background (because they forgot about capturing the club’s background lighting too).

If it’s your Ruby Wedding anniversary and you really want some nice shots of everyone -  perhaps you’re hoping for a picture you can mount and put on your wall – then you need a professional who can guarantee you quality shots and who knows how to format the files so they’re suitable for large prints.

Being able to work a camera is not the same thing as understanding the craft of photography, so if you’re unsure, then it’s best to ask yourself how important it is that you get good shots. If the answer is anything other than ‘not very important’, then you may want to err on the side of hiring a professional.

But professional photographers are expensive, is there really that much of a difference?

Other than the cost you mean? =D)

Well in a nutshell Yes. And it all has to do with craft and experience.

I stressed earlier that you need a pro if you want consistently good pictures. Well, consistency comes with experience; making and learning from mistakes; knowing your camera inside out; and knowing how different factors affect the exposure.

To give a few examples (I’m not bragging, honest): I recently did a shoot where my flash started playing up halfway through. It wasn’t recharging properly and would only fire on low power. A less experienced photographer may well panic or have to stop shooting. As an experienced shooter, I was able to adjust my settings and ISO speed to compensate for the lack of light and still deliver good quality images.

In a similar situation a few years ago, a fellow photographer (and member of the Freelance North collective) Bish, was doing a photo shoot for an important client when the LCD review screen on his camera stopped working, meaning he was unable to see what the pictures were coming out like. Being a consummate professional, Bish was able to keep shooting; intuitively altering his settings to suit the changing situations – and the shots came out fine (in the olden days of film, we had to shoot like that all the time but I can’t imagine those who learned shooting digital would cope as well with no review screen)!

I also said earlier that you need a professional photographer if the lighting conditions are difficult. I suppose its unfair of me to ask a non-photographer to predict when lighting conditions are going to be difficult and when they’re not, especially as you’d be surprised at how many scenarios are easy for the eye to take in but difficult for a camera to capture: A mix of different coloured lights, a mix of daylight and electric light, low-light (evening/night or even just indoors with one of those horrible yellow energy saving bulbs), outdoors when the sun is low in the sky, anytime where there is lots of contrast between the light and dark areas of a scene – all of these take skill and experience to photograph well.

As a brief example, I was recently shooting an awards dinner at the Natural History Museum and a lady asked me if I could take a photograph of ‘Dippy the Dinosaur’ (who dominates the atrium) and send it to her, because she couldn’t get a good shot with her point and shoot camera (very dark room with the dinosaur lit up in blue). What I did instead was take her camera and alter the setup so she could make a good picture with it herself (I did show her how to put it back to normal afterwards!).

In fact, taking a photograph yourself with a phone or point and shoot is a good acid-test of how well a camera can handle the scene and how good your photographer needs to be to make the pictures work!

I also mentioned using a professional photographer if you intend to make/buy prints. The reason for this is that professionals use colour managed software and monitors and know how to shoot, edit and format the files so that they’ll print well. It’s unlikely an enthusiast will have the skills or equipment to do this (having said that, if it’s just small prints you want and you’re not too fussy, then this won’t be a major concern).

Speaking of editing, that’s another skill that’s worth paying for. A professional photographer has this down and can edit your pictures to a high standard quickly and efficiently. Imagine letting Uncle Steve photograph your wedding only to have him send you a disc full of unedited pictures, or spend ages over-editing them! Wouldn’t you prefer a beautiful album of high quality prints delivered within the week? Of course you would! =D)

Well, I hope that wasn’t too boring for you! If I were to put it in one sentence for you I’d say, there’s nothing wrong with giving an enthusiast a chance to gain experience but if the images are important to you, then hire a professional photographer!

When I accept an assignment I do so in the knowledge that I’ll be able to deliver images the client will truly appreciate; that I’ll be able to manage the lighting conditions and composition, that I’ll have time to edit the pictures and bring out the best in them and that I’ll be able to deliver in a timely fashion. If I don’t think I can meet those self-imposed requirements – be that due to other commitments or because the job is not one of my specialties – then I’ll recommend someone who I think will be able to deliver what you need.

I hope that this blog has helped you decide when and why to hire a professional photographer – and remember – if you do choose to use a pro, you can book me by using the contact form on my site or just giving me a call. I’m based in Newcastle and will work anywhere (for the right fee!). If I can’t serve you, I’ll know someone who can!

So, check out some of the great Halloween costumes and enjoy the pictures and Happy Halloween everyone!

The easiest way to view them is to open one up and use the left and right arrow keys (on screen or on your keyboard) to cycle through them.

And remember, if you want to hire a professional photographer for your party in Newcastle pon Tyne – whatever the occasion – just give me a call or contact me through this website.

Nowadays, my aim is to make enough money with my corporate events photography business to allow me the time to shoot what I enjoy when I’m not working. We’re having such beautiful weather in the North east at the moment that you wouldn’t think it was autumn, so I took advantage of a free afternoon and went with my friend Mariella to take some pictures of Dunstanburgh Castle and the nearby Embleton Bay on the Northumberland coast line.

Read on for more pictures.

Embelton Bay isn’t exactly easy to find but that’s part of its charm. I suspect it’s deliberately kept secret by the locals to make sure it isn’t sullied by over exposure =D) You have to head for the Dunstanburgh Castle Hotel in Embelton and then take a reasonably long walk toward the Castle itself.

The walk takes you through a golf course, so keep an eye out for projectiles! Once through the course and through the reeds, you reach the long smooth sandy bay. Even in weather as good as this it was largely deserted.

If you head towards the castle you will soon reach the big, black, egg-shaped rocks made famous by landscape photographers such as Joe Cornish. These look best while still wet, if you want to take photos, try to time your visit for when the tide is going out.

It definitely felt good to get back to making some good landscape photographs. I even miss editing them – landscapes take more work in the editing suite than conference photography does simply because of the wider range of textures, colours details and contras. Taking the photograph is only part of the challenge, you also have to know how to get the best from the RAW file to really make the image.

I hope you enjoyed looking at these pictures as much as I enjoyed making them. As always, feel free to comment and let me know what you think. If you’re interested in buying any of my pictures as a nice wall print, canvas print or poster – get in touch!