Posted June 17, 2023
Last Tuesday I was invited to be the event photographer for the Ace Mentor awards ceremony. It was held on the 21st floor of one of the Amazon skyscrapers downtown, that was completely open and decked out as a modernist lounge, cafe and staging space.
The Ace Mentor program is an organization that helps high school kids who are on track to become engineers, hooking them up with companies in the industry for training and such. They must give the kids some sort of tests or challenges, because each year they hand out (fairly significant) cash prizes to the "winners." This is the second year in a row I've shot their ceremony for them, strictly on a volunteer basis.
Well, after all, I'm by no means a professional event photographer. But it's fun to dip my toes in and give it a whirl.
My "job" had two parts. During the mingling phase I was to circulate and take candids; then, during the awards ceremony, I was to capture each of 14 kids as they came up, shook hands, received their envelopes and made a short speech. I'll spare you the repetitive round of handshake pics, also because they chose to stage them at the very back, darkest corner of the room, at the end of the evening when the window light was failing, and they didn't come out that well. In that situation I had to choose between burst shooting and flash shooting, and went with the former, which I needed to net a good handshake pic (like I say, I'm no pro), whereupon I had to adroitly rescue them all in Lightroom. Even then, the handshakers were relentlessly in profile, with faces hidden by hair; I'll include the one pic where the presenter remembered to turn the kid to smile at the camera.
On the other hand, the mingling phase went great, well-lit as it was from floor-to-ceiling windows. It was an interesting crowd, with engineers, businessmen, teenagers and parents. There’s an art to candid shooting in a milling mass of people, because though you can be seen you don’t want to be, and there’s also an art to choosing what and whom to shoot. You’re out to flatter the event: anyone smiling, anyone laughing, any two people talking animatedly, get a shot; you don’t want people chewing, you don’t want people moping, you don’t want concerned parents or sullen teenagers. I shot mostly with the 45 f1.8 and 75 f1.8, for a little telephoto discretion, and when I'd find an angle between foreground shoulders to some businessman’s white-tooth eye-wrinkled smile and take the shot I'd think, “Good event photo!”
There were one or two moments where the street photographer in me took over and I snagged a distinctly un-corporate shot...but I didn't need to send those to the client. One of those -- the businessman with the drink at the window -- is one of my favorites.
Speaking of the client, stay tuned after the slideshow for an unexpected and difficult addendum.
So, one of the last photos of the evening was a group shot with all 14 kids. For that I did use my flash, and broke out my wide-angle lens, but I really failed to take enough photos, given that I was trying to get 14 teenagers to all have open eyes at the same time. I considered myself lucky with a shot in which 13 out of 14 had their eyes open and basically good expressions, and sent that to the client.
The response, after thanking me, was to point out the closed eyes on the 14th kid and ask if I had any other shots from the group pose. Well, none that were usable as a whole...but I did have one where that kid had his eyes open. So I polished off my extremely rusty Photoshop skills and (with some YouTube help) succeeded in popping that head onto the same kid's body from the first shot. Yes, I've joined the dark side of digital manipulation.
I haven't heard back from the client as to whether she's happy with the fix (second kid from the left). I think it came out okay. But then I'm no pro...
