Hiring an event photographer is an important step toward promoting your brand, your business, and your professional organization. Event photography involves capturing the key elements of each unique occasion including collateral and signage, keynote speakers, panel presentations, audience engagement, networking, receptions, dinners, and more. As experienced photographers, we understand the key aspects of your messaging that are illustrated throughout each occasion and know how to capture the images and moments that make your conference, meeting, convention, and trade show a must-attend event.
In planning an event, an integral part of the process is identifying and working with a professional photographer who knows their stuff and someone you can work with to get results that exceed your expectations.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the most essential key elements of hiring an event photographer so that you will know what to do to get started.
STEP 1: DETERMINE HOW THE PHOTOS WILL BE USED
Think about how you intend to use your images and what you want them to accomplish. Will you be using them to highlight featured speakers during the event for social media? Will the images be used to market the event for the years to come or is the photography coverage meant to simply document the event?
By communicating this with us at the beginning, you’ll ensure we’re both on the same page and we’ll shoot the kind of event images you need.
STEP 2: BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
If you are not quite sure yet what you want to use your photos for, look through this list and see which ones seem most applicable.
Marketing content– You may want to use your event photos for several marketing opportunities. List these below the heading marketing collateral.
Newspaper/magazines– Newspapers, magazines, and other types of publications all have specific criteria for photos including size specifications and submission deadlines. Some careful planning with us will make sure you pass along images that are optimized for their specific format.
Image Libraries– If you are building a photo portfolio of your services and/or products, hosting an event is a fantastic way to add to your library. Capturing the interaction between your products and people is a great way to get the word out about who you are and what you do.
Social media content– We all post photos to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to increase followers, likes, and leads. We can arrange to make photos available to you as the event is happening. For example, as your keynote speaker is presenting, you’ll receive a handful of shots via text message to use on your social media feeds. It’s difficult for us to see a well-executed event that uses cell phone photos to highlight their speaker presentations, panels, and networking. Trust us, we’ve got this and our images will look fantastic on your feed.
Poster and banners– If you want to capture moments to use in large posters and banners or other print media, you’ll want to give us a heads-up. We may want to adjust the sizes and dimensions of the final images we submit to accommodate your needs.
Online websites and blogs- If your goal is to create content for your websites or blogs, we’ll want to make sure you have access to images that are not only sized for print but also optimized for web use. Photos, if not sized properly for websites, can seriously slow down your site and when your site is slow, your bounce rate increases drastically. We’ll make sure to save a second set of the final images specifically for the web, ensuring that they are optimized to keep your visitors coming.
STEP 3: ACCESSING THE EVENT IMAGES
If you plan to put out a press release or use images for your social media feeds as the event is going on, you’ll want to give us a heads-up. We can upload images to Dropbox or what’s even faster, we’ll shoot over images for you via text. Just keep in mind, magazines and newspapers are particularly picky about meeting deadlines and they rarely have time to wait. Together, we can make it happen.
Stay tuned for the next blog post when we’ll wrap up the key elements for partnering with us for your event photography needs. In the meantime, please visit us on Instagram and check out our favorite event images.