The Journal
Guides and stories from behind the camera — weddings across the West Midlands, and commercial work for businesses in Birmingham and beyond.
Most conference photography gets used once, for a post-event round-up, and then forgotten. That's a waste — the images you commission this year are the ones that sell next year's event, and a little planning makes them work far harder.
Birmingham has more large conference space than anywhere in the UK outside London, and each venue photographs quite differently. After fifteen years working across most of them, here's what I've learned about the rooms themselves.
A conference is a long day with a fixed schedule, several rooms running at once and a marketing team who need images for next year's promotion. Covering it well is mostly a planning exercise.
Most couples tell me they hate having their photograph taken. An engagement shoot is the simplest fix for that — an hour together before the wedding, with no schedule, no guests and nothing riding on it.
Almost every timing problem I see on a wedding day comes down to the same thing: photographs were given ten minutes in the plan and needed thirty. Here's a realistic guide to how long things actually take, so your day doesn't run late because of the camera.
Group photographs are the part of the day most likely to overrun, and the part your parents will care about most. A little planning turns them from a bottleneck into fifteen easy minutes.
You cannot plan the British weather, and after fifteen years photographing weddings across the West Midlands I can tell you that rain is far less of a problem than couples fear. Some of my favourite photographs have come from the wettest days.
Booking a photographer for a company event is a different job from booking one for a wedding or a portrait. You're buying usable assets on a deadline, often for press and social media.
A good brief is the difference between a gallery full of nice pictures and a gallery full of pictures you can actually use. It doesn't need to be long, ten minutes of thought before the day will do more for your results than anything else.
Event photographs have a short shelf life. The window where they're genuinely useful, while the event is still being talked about, is often measured in hours, not weeks. That's why turnaround is worth as much attention as the photography itself.
"Documentary" and "posed" are the two words you'll hear most when you start looking at wedding photographers. Here's what each really means, how they feel on the day, and why most couples end up happiest with a blend of the two.
Your photographs are one of the few things you take away from your wedding once the day is over. After 15 years photographing weddings across Birmingham and the West Midlands, here's how I'd choose a photographer if I were in your shoes.
