5 Things Everyone Should Be Doing With Their Event Photography

Event photography is a specialized field focused on capturing moments and memories at various events, ranging from weddings and corporate gatherings to concerts and sports competitions. The primary goal of event photography is to document the event’s atmosphere, emotions, and key moments in a visually compelling and professional manner.

This article is written by Joe Jenkins. He is a full time photographer for the New York City and (occasionally outside New York City) market. His core focus is on portraiture and event photography.

Partygoer. NYC Midtown. Joe Jenkins Photography

Always carry a speedlight in Event Photography

When I first got into photography, I used to source a lot of jobs from gig sites like thumbtack, gigsalad, thebash, etc. Every now and again I’d look around at the competition and view their work, reviews, etc.
As an early reader of The Strobist (strobist.blogspot.com), I came equipped with speedlights from the very first day I got into photography and I was always puzzled when people didn’t use them when they clearly should have. I’d wander into a gallery of images taken in a poorly lit room with the ISO cranked up to some super high number and just end up wondering why the photographer responsible for taking them never used a flash (professional photographers are afraid of using flash if they’re coming from being natural light photographers, and they’re afraid of natural light if they’re flash based photographers).

At any rate, I remember I used to compete with this one photographer in particular who was roughly at the same skill and experience level as I, and I wandered onto his reviews. He had just received a 1-star review from a client who had complained about the fact that the photographer had been assigned to take images at night, in a club, and had brought no flash with him.

As a result, the images were for the most part completely unusable.

This being said, I can understand if you’re apprehensive about learning flash, but if you’re going to be a professional photographer, it’s something you need to do. Cranking up the ISO or opening up the aperture or reducing the shutter is not, at the end of the day, going to help you fake physics. Sometimes the light just isn’t there. Other times the light is there but horrible.

Bring a flash, always, and start using it when you don’t need to. Start using your speedlight when you’re in an atmosphere you’re comfortable in and maybe use it every one out of every ten photos or so, just to experiment and play around.

Your clients will thank you for it. Your skill level will go up. And you’ll get much more experience and well roundedness as a photographer. See the image examples at the below link for more information on this:
www.joejenkinsphoto.com/event-photographer-nyc

Girl Checking in at Docusign Momentum 2024, Joe Jenkins Photography

Be Shameless

Every so often someone comments on how unreal my candid moments are – that it seems unreal that I was able to get a photo at just the right time and just the right angle to capture that banner-wide smile shared group-wide.

And my answer is usually that those candid moments are, in fact, unreal.

Because I stage them. And I’ve no shame in doing so.

I live and work in New York City – a place where there are as many professional photographers as there are windows. The people here are used to seeing cameras and having their images taken.

This being said, I’ve gone up to so many people at conferences, events, activations, etc and asked them to smile that it’s beyond counting.
A really good example of this is when someone’s checking in at a conference. They’re standing in front of an iPad, looking down at the information, trying to type in their name and print their badge. The human response to this scenario is not to stand there and smile ear-to-ear. You’d be a bit of a weirdo if you did that.

Nevertheless, I’ll be standing there with my camera pointed at them and ask them, somewhat dryly, that I bet they want to smile while standing there and checking in.
And in that brief moment of levity, the person does smile. Because people like to help out. And maybe because I’m kind of funny. Or whatever. But either way, you get the shot, the client has marketing assets, and everyone is happy.

Be shameless. It’s fun.

A Little Image Grain Never Hurt Anyone

Bridal Shower. NYC. Joe Jenkins Photography

I own and operate a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where throughout the past few years I’ve attempted to break into the fashion industry. It’s a gruelling, uphill slog – but an extremely rewarding and challenging one.

Over those years trying to break into the said industry, I’ve made the switch from Lightroom to Capture One.

At first, I only switched over to Capture One for my portrait work – preferring to stay within the confines of the Adobe ecosystem for conferences and the like.

Then, slowly but surely, I began editing some of my event work in Capture. It started with a bridal shower that I was photographing somewhere around Wall St and ended up being a bit of a revelation, in terms of how it affected my work.

With Lightroom, everything used to be so robotic (I’d bump up the contrast, adjust the white balance, and maybe play with a few sliders here or there, and that’d be it) in my image edit and delivery.

With capture, on the other hand, I was doing so much more with my images, in terms of the edit and delivery – and that’s where I found the addition of grain to my images. It’s artificial grain, mind you, and added in by software, but for certain shoots and certain events it adds a sophisticated-looking sense of artistry to the images.

I don’t add it in on all of my shoots, especially corporate ones, but going back – a little grain never hurt anyone.

Get a Good Gallery System for Your Client Deliveries

I recently shot at one of the number one golf courses in the world for a Hedge Fund that has around 630 billion dollars under management. The golf course in question is called Shinnecock Hills Golf Course, and it regularly hosts things like the US Open. The hedge fund I was working for hired me for the day to go take photos of the event and document their clients playing golf on the course (their clients were all wealthy, and so my job was to photograph them playing golf).

The photographs came out really, really well and to be honest, I kinda crushed it.

Now, how did I deliver the images? I set up a Dropbox of course so that the client could download and distribute the images to the players that were present that day – that’s fairly standard.

But

I also have a subdomain set up on my website for client galleries, and I use shootproof (shootproof.com) to host those galleries. Dropbox is a great number of things, but its interface is a bit clunky if your client is going to be going through and looking at images.

Shootproof, on the other hand, has a beautiful, Pinterest-style gallery layout and the flow and display read like a magazine.

This being said, my client went ahead and passed that very gallery along to all of the players there that day, which means that all of those players had to manually go onto my website to view the images. And what’s wrong with a bunch of verifiably wealthy people looking at my website?

If you set up a gallery delivery system on your site, that means that occasionally, to share the photos, the client will give your site out to all the people who were present that day (to view the images). That’s a win.

What’s The Story?

Samsung North America President KS Choi, Citifield Joe Jenkins Photography

When I first got into photography, people would hire me for their events and always talk about ‘building a narrative.’ I thought it was the cheesiest, most self-important thing in the world and was just a bunch of event planners trying to glorify their jobs.

Then, the more experience I got, and the more time I had behind the camera, the more I began to see that there really is a narrative you can establish around an evening.

Your photos could be the most amazingly well-crafted images in the world, but they need contextual images to help them.

I regularly get hired for speaking engagements at fancy venues and, five years ago, I’d just take a boatload of speaker photos and call it a day. They’d be really good speaker photos, but for the purposes of, say, an article, my images wouldn’t really help a reader fully envision what encapsulated the day.

Takeaways of Event Photography

I’ve been a full-time event photographer in New York City for eleven+ years now and have seen and done all manner of things photography-related, but the above tips will really help you elevate your work and get into the field. The most important takeaway from all of this is to always carry a speedlight – no matter what. And, of course, do you in all things.

To see more of my event photography work, check out www.joejenkinsphoto.com.