I am really not much of an events photographer. Aside from the occasional birthday/wedding of a close friend or a relative, I normally turn down offer s for events. I guess I just don't have the desire to go running around taking pictures of everyone while the event organizer tells me what to shoot and who to shoot. I like working on my own terms with a little flexibility to choose a concept and how I'll go by it. This is not what happened here.
So, the communications manager of the office I work for and asked if I can take photos of our Senior Site Director. He's kinda like the highest ranking officer for our office. I said yes immediately. I was really excited and was thinking of ways how to shoot him in unique environments. I thought of shooting him by a long corridor, ala David Tejada, or maybe a snoot and umbrella combo ala Strobist. So many ideas, but I guess in the end it was not much of any use.
The the day of the shoot came. I brought my arsenal of gear and what not. I met with the subject and then met with the communications manager who contacted me. Before I could even suggest any of my briliant ideas, she pulled out a number of photos of one of the other site directors and asked me to emulate them. They were very nice pictures and from the looks of it were all lit naturally. I asked her who took them and she said " They were taken by a Reuters photographer". I gulped a huge amount of saliva and said "Reuters?". In turns out that they needed the photos right there and then, and no one else was available. They new my work because of the photo contest I won a few months back. Not only do they need the photos immediately, but they needed me to capture what a trained, professional Reuters photographer did. I did my best but I think i didn't do the best job emulating them.
I guess the gear I brought wasn't really for naturally lighting a subject. If I'm not mistaken, the Reuters guy probably used a full-frame camera with a top of the line lens. It's not that his gear was expensive, but it was technically more advanced than my gear. I had to crank up my ISO to 640 to get a decent shutter speed for the photo above, and it made a very noisy photo, whereas a full-frame camera would not have any problems even with a 12,000 ISO.
I think it was a good learning experience, though. I found out that no matter what I want to shoot, I would still need to make the client happy, even if it was a free gig. I guess this is why a lot of the pros out there have their own personal work to keep things in balance.
