Every genre of photography comes with its own challenges, and draws upon different aspects of the photographer’s skill set and experience. The carefully sculpted lighting and deliberate posing of portraiture have to give way to more flexible lighting styles, and a more “photojournalistic” shooting method when covering corporate events. However, that’s not to say that we have to give up all control over quality, and settle for mere “snapshots” of events; with a bit of creativity, it’s still possible to produce high-quality results with a minimum of equipment on-location.
Recently, I covered a pair of guest speakers at a corporate event: the Rev. Dr. Paul Smith,
Rev. Dr. Paul Smith speaking to associates about the civil rights movement, and his memories of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
who was a friend and associate of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his longtime friend, basketball legend Lenny Wilkens, who also knew Dr. King. They spent an hour or so talking about their experiences during the start of the civil rights movement in the US, and shared a number of personal stories and anecdotes from their lives.
I was asked to document the session, and produce a number of images for use on the company’s internal associate news web site. I had about 15 minutes to get ready in the conference room before they arrived, and needed to turn around the images within an hour or two after the end of the session, so that they could be posted online by the end of the work day.
Like most corporate offices, the dominant lighting in the conference room is from overhead fluorescent fixtures, and, as is typical for fluorescent lighting, it was neither very bright nor very flattering (overhead lighting causes “raccoon eye” dark eye sockets). Plus, fluorescent lights are greenish. Nobody looks good with green skin.
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