Clear.Bank Awards Party | 8 Northumberland
How to organise an amazing corporate event
I had the pleasure being the awards photographer for this amazing corporate party and thought it would be a great example of how to organise a beautiful corporate event by an London event photographer.
The Venue - 8 Northumberland
Obviously the first challenge is encouraging employees to turn up. Omitting for a moment the usual open bar, lavish venue and assorted snacks, given that awards ceremonies are usually outside of working hours, having easy access to hub London stations will certainly help sway peoples decision to make the night out. 8 Northumberland is situation just off Trafalgar Square and a short walk over the bridge from Waterloo station making it perfectly situated for access to Greater London and beyond. I have been an event photographer at many of London’s best event spaces and for a large awards ceremony as a dry hire this is certainly up there. You are greeted at the entrance to the attached ‘The Grand Hotel’ a Historic London Hotel with beautiful marble columns lining a decadent hallway. Sneaking left you go through a dimly lit corridor just long enough to build the tension before arriving to the high vaulted arch-lined event space.
Simplicity is key
The space itself does a lot of the heavy lifting. As you can see my client chose a simple and high impact decoration to compliment the lofty hall. The light up globes on the tables plus the saturated lighting helped add to the effect. The large globe projected onto the background of the stage all combined to create the desired astral or galactic theme (I’m not actually sure of the name of their theme). Photographing it was a joy. I love using interesting mixed lighting coming from all directions to create beautiful corporate photography and stunning event photography. I have certainly seen more extravagant set ups in used in this space but I think in terms of impact to cost this is the best I’ve seen in here so far
Saturated uplighting
Note on saturated lighting and my style. There is definitely a trend at the moment at events for this very saturated accent lighting. In general I’m a fan of it’s ability to transform a place. Of course I am - I’m a photographer and using lighting to accentuate scenes is a big part of that. For us as event photographers it’s sometimes difficult to know what to do with it in post. My normal style is a little more desaturated normally but I’ve tried bringing down the saturation of these uplighters in post and I think it dampens the effect that they were put there to create so usually if I’m on a shoot with these I’ll end up with more saturated images than normal!
Timing
Timing the different stages of the evening is a big factor. You want to give the guests a suitable amount of time before starting the awards. As my client did here, my experience is that it’s best to leave at least an hour for people to get suitably lubricated and get through the initial small talk before launching into the speeches and awards. The CEO of this company did a perfect job of keeping the initial blurb short and getting straight into the awards and I could tell it was appreciated by the employees.
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