Event photography was one of the first professional areas of image capturing that I started in, and is still something that as a company we still cover each year. I have an event specialist that works at my company now so I split the event work between us but I still get to attend a number of functions each year.

Witnessing and capturing candid moments from behind a lens is actually quite an intimate and moving experience at times. I have been lucky enough to be a fly on the wall at some amazing events with incredible speakers that were very skilled at connecting with the audience and guiding them along a journey mentally and emotionally in what really are quite short periods of time. When a member of the audience is engaged in this way and are focused on the speaker or their surroundings but aren’t aware of the photographer taking their image you can get some solid gold imagery. Combine this with creative angles, varying focal lengths and some good exposure and there’s a recipe for beautiful real photos.

This year in particular I was lucky enough to be asked to a number of events that were focused on women and growth in their chosen professions and life as a whole. I was witness to some quite profound shifts in perception and beliefs by some participants attending at these dates.

There is usually a lot of positive energy and fun at these functions also which is infectious and a lot of fun to be around. That being said they can be long days without much time to take a break so its always best to bring plenty of water and healthy snacks along with you so that you can keep firing an all cylinders for the whole event or attempt to.

We pretty much always shoot in RAW so after sifting through and picking the best imagery there is usually quite a bit of lightroom editing to get through after the day or days of shooting. I do know quite a few photographers that shoot straight to jpeg at events and this is definitely faster and less work after finishing the event but I really enjoy the freedom RAW images leave for highlighting or enhancing parts of or whole photographs.

I will continue to write some more about the varied areas of photography and video that we cover each year in future blog posts.