Event Photography

If you’ve ever had a camera in a school and taken photos of something, I’m sure you’ve thought about taking photos for the school. Maybe eventually branching out and taking photos of events outside of school. If so, then this might help you out. I’ll be talking about my own experience of event photography and how I went from nothing to taking photos of a concert of international scale. (It’s really not as impressive as it sounds, it was really easy, I just had a good opportunity.)

So, let’s start with the beginning. Before applying to the school I am currently in, I inquired some of the students about the possibility of photography in the school. They told me that my school offers a journalism club, but that there isn’t any special dedicated photography offers.

After being accepted, I joined the journalism club. There is where I was offered the unique opportunity to take photos for the school. School has many events, why not give it a go?

It’s been rather usual for me, sometimes taking photos of minor events, sometimes more major ones. Sometimes taking photos of hallway sales events, sometimes taking photos of heavily planned out events that matter.

I continued like this for a year, until September 27th. That was when a friend of mine sent us an Instagram post by Baisun Festival (K-Pop concert thing). It was of one of the judges, who used to be a K-Pop idol. My friend, who is really into K-Pop, was rightfully very excited as she would be dancing in that event. Now, while I have no interest in K-Pop, I do have an interest in experience.

And this could give me some great experience.

So, I sent them an email, apparently I was a bit late to the registration for volunteers (only by a month, who cares, right?), but they accepted me and added me to the group of other volunteers. Some were in charge of managing everything, others in charge of videos, and I was the photographer alongside another volunteer.

And along came the event on November 18th. I was terrified for the entire week, especially for the last 24 hours. I woke up at 5:04 to get to the train in time, which was fun. I even ran to the festival to get ahead of the group that was on the train with me.

Arriving there I immediately discovered my gear would not be up to par. It was too dark for me to take good photos. But hey, what can I do? So I just did what I could. Taking photos at some very bad settings (1/100th, F3.5-5.6 depending on the focal length, and ISO 6400, in hopes that I could get SOMETHING worth my time. Unfortunately, it was more or less a lost cause. The photos were too dark for anything good and editing luckily fixed them to some extent, but not to what I would want.

There were, however, still 6 hours to the start of the event, so I went to take some photos of other stuff. It was quite fun, just walking around, some of the ones that went great were the ones at the registration point, the lighting was great. I also went and explored some of the other parts of the relatively small venue. Still, I had that thought in the back of my mind, wondering how it would go and if the lighting was good enough during the event.

As 13:00, the start of the event, approached, I felt a sense of dread, knowing that whatever happen would happen and I would be unable to change a thing. I would have to lower my settings and hold the camera even steadier if the lighting wasn’t adequate, not the other way around, which is what I was used to.

They dimmed the lights, got everything ready, and the announcers went on stage. I checked my settings and it was too bright. I was confused for a second, it didn’t look that much brighter, but I was able to push 1/400th, F5.6, and ISO 3200, which is crazy for an indoor scene.

During the actual dancing parts I had a lot of back pain because I had to lean forwards at an awful angle to get a good composition, which wasn’t fun. But what was fun was meeting some cool people and working in a team! It felt very coordinated and that was really nice to see.

And obviously there was the benefit of meeting some famous people too. If you check their site you will see that the judges included some rather famous people, one of them the aforementioned K-Pop idol, who I also met. There wasn’t enough time to talk to them, but I got really close to them during some moments, especially towards the end of the show. One thing I found funny was how if I was taking photos of them or they were in the camera’s field of view, and they saw that, they would just pose immediately and continue until I indicated that the photos were taken by lowering my camera.

So overall, it was a great event and a lot of fun. It’s just one story out of many and it goes to show how event photography can be some great fun! It was amazing looking back at it even though it was really stressful during the event and I had to run quite a lot to save time due to the intense pace of the event.

So to answer the question of is event photography fun?

YES.

If you get the chance to do some event photography, absolutely do it. It’s amazing.