The year of 2022 saw a post-pandemic return to event photography normality, in the form of larger scale, bolder and more confident events and conferences.
My coverage across south Wales included housing professionals, computer programmers (great to be back for PyCon UK after a two-year break), dentists, health and care research professionals, and physicians. There was a healthcare and medical theme to a number of them which felt largely coincidental.
This 2022 event photography blog post contains a few of my favourite images from events at venues such as Cardiff Castle, Cardiff City Hall, the Village Hotel in Swansea, SWALEC Stadium and the Cardiff Marriott hotel.
As ever, the conferences were educational for me. It’s often interesting to hear industry specialists waxing lyrical about their areas of expertise. Sometimes the talks were accessible enough to the photographer layman to understand while shooting, and other times they were less so. The latter included case studies involving the intricacies of root canal dental surgery, replete with detailed videos of procedures on badly smashed-up mouths. Not for the faint hearted.
There was some small curious poetry in the conference of dentists being pulled out of conference venues three times in one day due to fire alarms, once at City Hall during the day, and twice at the beautiful but heat-sensitive Cardiff Castle.
I found myself experimenting more with in-camera double exposures as a way of offering something a little different to the standard wide shot of conference speakers standing next to a slide from one of their presentations. Mixing an exposure of a presentation slide with an exposure a speaker or an audience member can give an unusually striking effect. Some might find it too much: jarring and incoherent, weird and random. Others might find it offers something more eye-catching or compelling to the norm. It’s obviously a subjective one, but if you provide the client with several different options then they can take or leave it as they choose.
If you have any business events or conferences coming up in 2023, please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a quote.