Background Story
We were recently hired to photograph the distinguished alumni awards event for NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, or as I learned very quickly, “CALS”. Yes, I kept thinking everyone was saying “cows”, so I chalked that up to something to do with the agriculture program, but finally figured out it was the acronym for the college. 🙂 You learn something new every day, right!?!
All kidding aside, it was quite an experience get to hear what some of these distinguished alumni have accomplished in industry and academia. Some were head of large global research companies and some were distinguished professors at other leading universities etc. etc. Quite impressive to say the least, but the one common theme was how much they all gained from their time with all the incredible professors and staff at NCSU. It’s always fun and interesting when we photograph events for organizations, because they’re all a little different and you get to learn some cool new things, if your lucky, and meet lots of great people, like Gary Hahn – the voice of the wolfpack, who was emcee for the event (you can see him in 4th image below).
The Photography Challenge
For this job, we were photographing in a large hall with high ceilings and a really challenging mixed lighting situation. We had lots of natural light coming from the large wall of windows (which was gradually changing as we went from day to evening), which was mixed with the incandescent room lighting. We needed to photograph the speakers speaking along with a group photo just after their speech, so we were shooting with two different lighting set ups. We shot the speakers with ambient light, using high ISO and fairly wide aperture settings because we couldn’t use flash since it would be distracting. We had lights (on camera and off camera flashes with modifiers) for the group photos, and of course we carefully balanced that with ambient light so the background wasn’t to dark. On top of all of the technical challenges, we had a fairly small space for the group photos and had to work around a somewhat annoying school photographer shooting with a mobile phone. All that to say, hiring a professional for your important events is the key to getting great results regardless of the situation. As a pro, you always have to bring not only the right equipment, but more importantly the technical & people skills to every job, because you never know what you’ll run into.
After reviewing the images from the event, the director that hired us said she was absolutely thrilled with the results. She even wanted to go ahead and book us for next year’s event and expand the scope to photographing the tail gate event (NCSU football) for all the alumni in the PNC Arena. Super excited about that for next year! Thanks for reading, enjoy the images below and hope you enjoyed a little slice of what we do everyday.
Keywords: Raleigh event photography, event photography, Raleigh events, corporate event photography,