Nothing like three 14 hour days in a row with a mandatory 12 hour turnaround on the photos and a slideshow due by 8am the next morning. It’s a good thing I took a vacation the following week, but this is what an event photographer does on a regular basis. Personally, it’s a love and hate relationship for me.
- I love the opportunity to build a relationship with my client and the attendees over the duration of the event.
- I love the large sum of money that can be made from these multi-day events I love having lots of time to get creative and capture portfolio shots, but also get shots unique to my client that they really appreciate when they view the photos after the event.
- I love the endless amounts of food of absolutely amazing food.
- I don’t like how I can’t feel my feet at the end of the day.
- I don’t like editing the images until 1am after finishing the gig at 10:30pm to produce the slideshow.
What made this last event fantastic? Well it was for Electronic Arts, how cool is that… “EA Sports….it’s in the game”. Yea those guys. I learned a ton about their games, marketing strategy and more (it feeds the nerd part of me) and it was all very interesting. Not only that, I was fed like a god which is always a plus. To give you an idea of the scope of work for this gig:
- 42 hours of work.
- 4 days.
- 4,000+ photos.
- 3 slideshows for the next morning about 5 min in length each (see the example below).
- Slideshows delivered by the next morning at 8am.
- Only 100 people…yep, only a 100 people attended. It was a very intimate event.
- 962 final images delivered to the client within 72 hours of the event coming to an end.
- Location was the Hotel Del Coronado (not too shabby).
So as you can see from the specifics of the event it was long and turn around times were tough, but other than that it was straight forward. Working for large companies is great because they value a photographer’s service, pay what we are worth and appreciates the final product. Check out some of the photos.