Conference photography

It was great to get this recent commission from an Irish based international company to shoot an event at their Dublin headquarters. The company has plants all over the globe, and a bunch of their best delegates were in town for this unique occasion. I got short notice to come in and photograph this business conference but everything happened smoothly in the end.  The weather was average Irish weather (changeable) so I had to blend the daylight background of the room and the exterior with flash. It didn’t help that I had a rotten head cold on the day either.

Brief

The brief was to shoot a range of poses, engaged and ‘in action’ during the meeting session with no stationary, stiff, face-to-camera type poses. They should be ‘warm, friendly and engaging’. I planned to flood the room with light using umbrellas, but the layout dictated that I could only use one. It worked nicely to give me some directional light, with soft shadows and in most cases I shot people in profile. I used a long lens to keep the background soft, with a narrow dept of field, which meant I had to be very careful with focus. With a job like this, facial expressions are constantly changing, so I had to shoot quite a lot of material. It was also important to capture some photos of every delegate in the room, and they were often stuck behind others, so this was quite tricky.

Processing

I used Lightroom for post-processing, with a small degree of desaturation and some vibrance added to the tone which I kept a little cooler than the average colour temp. I also crated a unique contrast curve for the event, as lighting conditions were similar throughout. However, as there was a very international crew of people present, each shot had to be adjusted separately for skin-tones and lightness. Some of the shots were also adjusted in Photoshop.

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