birthday party coverage

It was my first time to cover a children's party last May 24 and I would say it's not easier than covering weddings. In fact, I felt more pressure covering this event.

For one, the photo opportunities in a children's party is much less than in a wedding. In a wedding, the number of photos that I usually take range from 500-700 photos (total of 1000-1500 for 2 photographers), and that includes the preparation, entourage, ceremony, group shots and reception phases. In a birthday party, the only section of the event that can be a photo opportunity is the program. And all the other shots are of the people attending the event (candid and posed) and portraits of the celebrant with his/her parents.

Aside from the number of photo opportunities, the more candid approach needed in party photography introduces a little bit of difficulty for me. In weddings, although we sometimes employ the photo-journalistic style, we still provide instructions to the couple. Many of the shots that we take are posed and the environment is cleared/selected to have less distracting backgrounds. On the other hand, in a children's party, everything is out of our control. Children running around and parents distractingly in the background of most photos. The angle where we can take photos is also very limited.

And although we were able to take a sizable number of pictures (about 1000 total for 2 photographers), most of them ended up in the trash. How and why were we able take 1000 photos? I don't know how, but I know why. It's because of our fear not having enough photos and our philosophy in events photography: "the more entries you send, the more chances of winning."

To add to the photos that we already have, we also tried to convince the parents to have a photo session after the party so that we can take more appealing photos. And we were very lucky that they obliged. We even got the dad to ride a boat with his daughter while we were by the mini-lake taking pictures. Here's my friend in action (also to add some color to this boring post):


On the other hand, compared to wedding coverage, I like the "post event" work for this party. Since the package that they availed is raw photos only, I didn't have to create an album which, for my skill level in PhotoShop, takes a lot of time. The 2500 fee for birthday party coverage isn't such a bad deal. But, a certain part of me is saying that I should charge higher. A professional photographer once told my that I should be able to recover my equipment expenses from 20 clients. And that means, with my current equipment, that I should charge 4-5K per project. Maybe, next time, I'll charge 3K to get closer to that value. And when I'm that good already, maybe I can go higher. :)