Make the juice worth the squeeze
Recently, I covered a keynote for my colleague, Alan Stein, Jr., at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
Unlike the typical, cramped conference rooms, this venue was massive, with a T-shaped stage and a sprawling 180-degree upper bowl section.
As a photographer, these types of venues give you a lot to play with, but also present their own challenges.
The empty seats, for example—when you’re photographing a crowd of 400 in a venue built for 9,700, you have to get creative with your angles to make the place still feel big, but also more filled out.
But these kinds of shots are worth the effort. Capturing photos from elevated positions or unique angles is valuable for speakers because it proves that they speak in big rooms, which can ultimately help them land bigger gigs.
While those up-above vantage points provide great opportunities for unique and valuable shots, there is a downside:
They take time to create.
It burns a lot of time to walk up, find angles, and capture the speaker and audience, all while framing out the empty space in the venue. On top of that, the photographer also runs the risk of missing out on key moments when separated from the action below.
To cover myself, I overshot - even by my standards - the first 20 minutes of Alan’s talk, making sure I captured a ton of variety from multiple angles on the ground before heading up. By the time I went upstairs, I felt confident I had enough shots from the floor, so I went to explore the upper level.
Once I got up there, I moved quickly, experimenting with different compositions and even dangling my camera through a guardrail to grab the best shots.
And I’m glad I did.
The final shots created a sense of scale that will be incredibly valuable for Alan’s visual assets, showing him on a massive stage with the space looking full and impactful.
Long story short, when you make the juice worth the squeeze, be smart about it.
Make space for creative risks to get that magic for your clients. It’s these types of decisions that help create the most valuable possible.