Shooting for a wedding or an event takes no effort at times when you’re shooting alone. The concept is simple; compose and take good photographs and hand it to your clients.

But when you’re shooting for a large conference such as Asia Conference, it takes one to be more than just a photographer responsible of taking photos. Spanning a period of 5 days, you need more than just 1 photographer to cover an event that has 14 mains sessions and 6 workshops. You need a team!

I am blogging this to share my thoughts and experiences that I have taken from this 5-day long huge conference that involves more than 50,000 people. First of all I am deeply honored to be able to take part in this event as a photographer. Though my main responsibility is to take effective pictures to publish it to the media for the masses to see, I would say that much more effort is being done at the backend rather than the frontline. In order for photos to take into effect, there are a lot of processes in between the time when the photographer snaps the photo and the time when the photos are published. Here are some learning points I’ve learnt in this conference:

Teamwork:

Face it, shooting in an expo hall requires more than just a photographer. There are more things happening beyond the stage in order to capture a complete story of the happenings in a main session. Crowd shots are needed to document the attendance of the conference. Expressions of the audiences have to be taken down to show engagement and not forgetting the activities that are happening on the stage itself. Unless you’re omnipotent, it is not possible for you to be shooting the pyrotechnics and then be shooting close-ups of the performances on stage. Team work is important if you need to get the job done; team work happens when each and everyone knows what types of photos they are suppose to cover.  Trust in your fellow crew members is equally important so that you’ll have an ease of mind while shooting.

Proper Workflow:

The data flow of digital images is the core backbone of the entire photography system. Once a bottleneck at a certain point of transfer happens it is most likely that the photos will be delayed and publishing becomes difficult. Hence it is important to have a proper storage and filing system that is straight forward and organized. It is useless to take the best photos and have them uploaded all over the place in your hard drive. Besides hundreds of photos are churned out after every session and it is essential to have a proper filing system so that you can find any specific photo you need anytime.

Effective Communication and People Handling:

Taking photos is one thing, being able to handle a team of photographers well is another. Ultimately, the photos are shot by people and they need to be properly managed and well taken care of. That means they need rest and most importantly their welfare is being taken care of. Communication skills must be clear and concise; people know what to do and they do not do it wrong. Having a good skill knowledge on photography is not enough, one needs to be able to think ahead and have good situational awareness because anything can happen in the conference and by missing the moment could mean that you’ve missed a very important shot. Ultimately people needs to feel appreciated for their effort and time taken to be shooting for you.

I hereby want to thank all the photographers who gave their time and effort to cover this huge event. I want to thank all for the early mornings and late nights, the effort you made in every shot. You were the difference that made the photography crew as who we are today.

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