Photography for Events

Photography for Events

Intro

Hey there, and welcome to another action-packed, insightful, through in another awesome adjective…Momentum 360 weekly blog! As we always say, if this is your first time joining us, cheers and welcome! We look to provide as much value as possible about everything virtual tours, photography, videography, 3d rendering and virtual staging.

If you’re an avid 360 blog fanatic, welcome back to another one, we have an absolute great one for you today! In this one, we’ll be discussing everything related to photography for events! That’s right! Weddings, bachelor parties, birthday parties, etc, you need high quality photography for events.

Whether you’re hiring a professional photographer or doing the photography yourself, you need to know how to capture the best moments from the event! Because honestly, if you don’t have some dope pictures to reflect the incredible night…did you even have an incredible event to begin with?? In all seriousness, it’s super important to take high quality photos from your event. Photography for events has been around for a long time, but not many people are good at it, so don’t just be good at it, be great at it!

Equipment

In previous blogs, I’ve talked about using advanced cameras to capture the moment, and to not use old, outdated cameras that simply don’t belong in the same realm as the newer ones. I’m going against the grain with this one and being bold. If you’re trying to do photography for events, you don’t need the best camera in the world to take high quality pictures. What you do need is a decent camera, but even better understanding of angles + understanding of photography to take good quality shots.

I reference this a lot, but Malcolm Gladwell, one of the most inspiring authors of this generation, created the rule of “10,000 hours.” Meaning, if you do something for 10,000 hours, you’re considered a master at that craft. So, if you spent 10,000 hours learning, shooting, doing everything you can to become the best photographer you can be, you’re officially a master. Point being, you need to become the master first, and then it doesn’t matter what kind of equipment you use. A master with a mediocre camera beats an amateur photographer who has an amazing camera, every single day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Shot List

Birthday party, ceremony, wedding, there are so many things that classify an “event”..so what should be a general shot list that any photographer can follow to take photos at the event? We’re glad you asked!

For events, we always follow this guide:

• Emotional Shots

Cover shots that create an emotional link between you and the people in the shot. Whether this is a bride walking down the aisle with her dad, someone being lifted on to a chair in celebration or what, you need to have emotional shots that create some sort of emotion inside of the person who’s checking out this image.

• Funny Action Shots

Of course, you need action shots when you do photography for events! This is, popping bottles, people falling down laughing, all the crazy stuff that goes on with parties and what not. You need to create action shots that not only instill emotion in people, but give them a huge laugh while looking at them.

• Dancing

Another obvious one on the shot list, you need to capture people busting a move! Whether they can dance or not doesn’t matter, you need to capture the fun and liveliness of the atmosphere. An event isn’t an event without dancing, so whether you’re a dancing pro or not, get your fellow people on the dance floor and capture them having a great time!

• The “Wow” Factor

Usually at fabulous events, the people throwing the event have something there that creates a “wow” moment. Whether this is a sculpture made out of ice, a person juggling fire swords or whatever, you need to once again capture this moment if you’re the one doing the photography for events. It’s imperative that you can show that the group throwing the event has class and knows how to throw down.

Once you have these shots created in your mind, you immediately need to talk to your photographer to give them. Like most humans, they can’t read your mind! So you need to be proactive with what you want, and send over the shots you have in mind so they can note them down. If you talk about these shots in such a way, the photographer will label these as the “money shots” and make sure not to forget them.

Cost

Ah, the part that everyone loves to talk about! Just kidding, but seriously, it needs to be talked about. If you aren’t willing to dedicate a good portion of your event budget to hiring a professional photographer, then all bets are off. You’re not just paying them for their time spent there, but you’re paying them for their years of experience and knowledge of the game!

See, anyone nowadays considers themselves to be a photographer. Little do they or the person hiring them know that the tiny bit of experience they have will simply not amount to anything decent in terms of this project. So it’s best to just spend that extra hundred dollars or so, the more expensive something is, the more valuable it is…period.

For general pricing for photography for events, the average range is roughly $100-200/hr. Momentum 360 is on the more expensive side of things, simply because we provide so much more value than the average photography company. For us, we’re roughly $250-300/hr. Again, it all depends on the type of event photography we’re actually doing. Granted, it doesn’t matter much but it does depend on factors like how long we’ll be there, what exactly we’re shooting, the venue, other locations, etc etc.

Bottom line, don’t cheap out on photography. Better to pay the extra dough and not have to worry about it, rather than cheaping out and worrying throughout the entire event if the photos will come out good. Photography for events is one of the harder things to do on the photography scope, so you need to hire an experienced photographer who knows what they’re talking about.

Experience

We talk about this all the time, but experience, experience and more experience! This is how you dominate and win the game of photography. Once you have your Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours under your belt, then you’re now considered a master of the game and you can teach others! You can tell a lot about how experienced a photographer is in the questions you ask. If you’re talking to an amateur photographer, they’ll probably yes you to death and agree with all of your points, just to secure a gig.

Whereas a professional photographer will ask you a million questions to ensure they understand the gig that you need shot. They’ll ask you about duration, location, budget, type of camera, type of shots, day/night, all of this stuff. If you start getting these questions, you’ll know you have someone that is pretty solid with event photography.

End of the day, the best way to know if someone is legit is to simply google “best photography for events” and see what comes up. Reading reviews is extremely helpful and important to making a final decision on what will work best for you.

Objective

This might sound weird, but you need to find out what your objective is with getting these shots. Once you understand this, you can relay to your photographer and talk about what exactly you’re trying to achieve with these shots. Is this something you’re looking to post on social media? Want to have this in a physical photo album? You need to answer this question and your photography will come out much better!

To figure this out, you need to reverse engineer the event. If you’re planning a wedding, your event photography will be more of a legacy play so you can look back on it and enjoy the sweet memories! You also want to send this to your best mates to relive some funny memories with them as well, as I’m sure one or two or your whole friend group is a cast of characters!

Photography for events is a really fun thing to plan, especially once you have your objective, so do yourself a favor and create the goal in mind you’re trying to achieve!

Hiring Us

Hiring us is very simple! Just to give you some background on the company, this is Sean Boyle, Founder of Momentum 360, we’ve been around since 2017, we currently have over 1,000 photographers working for us, and we cover the entire nation! Pretty cool right? We also have a really crafty understanding of how to make your event photography successful, from A-Z!

If you’re looking to hire us for your next event photography need, just following these steps:

• Call our HQ number at 215-607-6482
• Email us at info@momentumvirtualtours.com
• Go to our website momentumvirtualtours.com and fill out a form
• Go to our socials and direct message us (@momentum360) for most social handles
• Google “Momentum 360”

There’s no excuse for you not to find us on Google!

Momentum 360 is a Premiere Small Business and Real Estate marketing company in Philadelphia and tri-state area. Our main service offerings are 3D Virtual Tours powered by Matterport, as well as photography and videography. We are both a Matterport Service Provider and Google Trusted Photography agency.

While 3D Virtual Tours started in real estate, they are versatile and applicable across every industry. Momentum 360 specializes in virtual tours for real estate, small businesses, restaurants, retail, healthcare, professional services, and much more. These virtual tours help our clients showcase their business online, while also allowing them to rank higher on Google with SEO, and get more followers on social media. Call for a quote.

Our partners Sean, Mac and Luke have been digital marketing experts for 10+ years now, and all carry a wide array of skills that adds to our team’s great success! If you’re ever needing website design, search engine optimization, google/youtube/facebook/instagram/tiktok/linkedin ads, or anything digital marketing related, make sure we’re the first people you talk to!

Mac actually worked at Google, so he has tremendous knowledge and experience on how to get your small-medium-large business to rank higher on Google.

If you’re at the end of this blog, we thank you so much for reading this! If you haven’t yet, follow us on social media @momentum360 as well as checking out our new exclusive Momentum 360 Facebook Community, which we just launched earlier this month! We’re looking to get to 100 clients by the end of the year. So do yourself a solid and become a client of ours, so we can invite you to the group!!

From everyone here at Momentum 360, stay hungry and keep grinding, gang. We wish you the best, all the love, let’s continue to inspire and do great things in the world. We’ll see you in the next one!