Here are some pointers I compiled as a rough guide which you can pass along whenever you hire a professional photographer to take photos on-site at an event. Note: this is taken from the perspective of what makes a solid website hero image. You likely have other needs for the PDF and other materials.
ALSO - none of these points should be taken as absolute: of course photographers will (and should) take loads of different photos that we’ll need to shift through regardless. Hopefully this gives them a better idea of what to focus on for our needs.
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For the event team:
- If you're going to invest in a photographer, please consider also investing in professional lighting for the main stage as well.
- Professional/colorful lighting further creates an interesting/exciting atmosphere for speaker and crowd shots. Often, regular indoor lighting can make photos look flat.
Photography: Subject
- Smiling or engaged people / not all on phones or looking bored.
- In the end, we're only going to use photos that portray our events as being fun and engaging - this is the tone we're trying to get across.
- Diversity of gender and ethnicity represented where possible.
- We want to appeal to as many different people and viewpoints as possible, and avoid making anyone feel excluded or under-represented.
- Try to avoid too many shots with large branding visible, even the event logo itself.
- This allows us to reuse photos across events, and keeps focus on the atmosphere.
- Some "B-Roll" photos of food, venue, etc can be okay, but can be kept to a minimum.
- We simply don't use these shots very much. People are the focus.
Photography: Framing
- Take landscape and wide shots (horizontal orientation).
- Background images on our websites generally take up far less vertical space, especially on wide monitors.
- The subject of the shot shouldn't take up the full height of the photo.
- This makes it much easier to frame the image on a responsive website without having someone's head cut off.
- Leaving an empty or low contrast area in the photo is ideal. Shallow depth of field is nice.
- This allows us to lay text over the image without disturbing the subject of the photo or obscuring the readability of the text.
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