On January 30th, 2014, I was invited to photograph another event at London’s opulent Savoy Hotel – an exhibition of rarely-seen photos of Kate Moss, put together by the Zebra One Gallery. There were around a dozen or so images from throughout Miss Moss’s modelling career, some dating all the way back to her very first portrait shoots, and a host of celebrities invited to browse the collection and take part in a charity auction for Shooting Star Chase.
Walking past the pack of paps waiting at the main entrance to the Savoy for the guests to turn up was an interesting experience, but inside the venue I got to do my thing: reportage-style event photography – basically a record of the evening, capturing the mood and the goings-on as candidly as possible. Obviously I asked guests for the occasional posed shot by their favourite Moss photo, but on jobs like this my style is generally to go for off-guard, candid shots of the guests enjoying the evening, and capture proceedings in a documentary fashion. I came away with some great moments, particularly during the auction.
For me a very valuable aspect of the night was seeing other kinds of photographers at work, something I don’t often get to do. As I mentioned there was the usual paparazzi area outside, capturing images of well-dressed celebs for next days papers, but also five or six other photographers inside the venue: some invited for the national press, others for the celebrity-focussed magazine circuit, and a few more like me working for other parties involved in the event. I took some time out to watch the pros at work, particularly how they interacted with the celebs to get the posed shot they wanted, and got chatting to a few about gear and setups which was very educational.
You can find out more about my event photography here.
Technical notes
I shot almost all of these on my Nikon D700 using my 24-70 and 70-200 lenses, both f/2.8. To make sure everyone looked their best in the fairly dim tungsten-lit indoors setting I used an SB-800 flash on the camera, gelled with one and a quarter CTO and pointed pretty much straight up (actually one notch forward) to bounce down onto my subjects off the white ceiling. I think ISO was in the 800-1600 range most of the time, giving me effectively more power and faster recycles on the flash.
I could probably have gone straight up to 6400 ISO and shot without flash, but I’d have got much less clear shots as detail starts to smudge the higher the ISO. I do try not to use flash at events when I can help it but with so many other photographers in the room also bouncing flash (although curiously none seemed to have gelled their light) I decided I may as well use it too!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the photos.
