Shooting Event Photography

Ahead of the British Grand Prix 2021, Red Bull affiliated charity Wings for Life brought me in to produce event photography of their “Clay Day” which is a fundraising shooting event put on for their sponsors and donors.

Photographing an event like this is relatively straight forward in its mechanics and more comes down to logistics and how you manoeuvre your way around everything that’s going on.
With multiple groups all competing against each other for awards such as “best shot” the pressure was definitely on to make sure all if not most people attending were photographed in one way or another and the VIP attendees were also captured interacting with guests.

My first piece of advice for someone covering an event like this would be to blend in. You don’t want to be bumbling your way through asking people for photographs and interrupting the flow of everything going on. You want to act as a fly on the wall. This will benefit your imagery massively because what you want from these types of commissions is to capture emotion and a story, for imagery to feel natural.

My second bit of advice for any budding event photographer would be to use a belt system to carry kit, I run a Think Tank Pro Speed Belt with the Modular Essential Set V3.0 pouches. This will enable you to carry and access equipment on the fly without needing to break the flow of your photography by either going back to your camera bag in another room or taking one off your back to change lens etc – on the backpack note, there’s nothing more annoying when covering an event than lugging around a large camera bag on your back, bumping into things, getting a sweaty back, the list goes on and on. Trust be, go for a belt system, you’ll never look back!

In mine I keep:

  • 70-200mm lens, in case someone gets up on stage and you need to grab some frames of that, or if you want to shoot through crowds of people to get tight ups of people laughing/interacting. Otherwise I personally like to cover events using a 24-70mm and 16-35mm.
  • A flash gun, as we all have experienced, lighting on events is unpredictable, be prepared for every eventuality instead of missing the shot.
  • Spare batteries
  • CF Cards
  • Chamois leather, this both acts as a lens cloth and as they’re somewhat waterproof can be used to throw over cameras in case of rain.