It Takes a Team to Photograph a TED

I’ve talked a bit about what it was like to be the main stage photographer at TEDGlobal 2009, but there’s a lot more to getting the job done than just showing up, snapping pics, and posting them. In the case of both TED events I’ve worked on—TED 2009 in Long Beach and TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford—it’s taken a team of talented and dedicated people to get the job done

For starters, at TEDGlobal 2009, there were two primary photographers. I was on the hook for covering the main stage. Equally important, however, was the work that Robert Leslie did shooting everything that happened outside the main room, including the social events, parties, and the atmosphere around TED. Both of us blurred these lines a bit. Robert shot some in the main room when big things were happening, such as the Prime Minister’s appearance. I shot some coverage of the parties. But, for the most part, this divide and conquer approach worked well to bring you complete coverage of the event through the TED Conference Flickr stream.

I should stress that neither Robert or I were “primary” or “secondary” shooters in terms of a pecking order. We both had our zones of responsibility and we both tackled the jobs at hand. When we were in the same area, we even tended to make sure we were taking different angles so that if something happened, at least one of us would be in a good position. It was a great way to work.

Robert Leslie in the halls at TED 2007 • leslieimage.com

Robert and I spent all of our time either shooting, moving to the next event to shoot, or trying to eat a bite as we zipped off to wherever we were needed next. The good news is that we didn’t have to deal with the hundreds of Gigabytes of image data we created. Instead, we handed our cards off to the media team who had a fleet of machines setup to deal with our output. For time critical photos, we had Karen Eng, to quickly zip photos from wherever we were to the media room and get them ingested into the workflow. For slower priority photos, we’d drop cards off as they filled up, typically when we were also looking for a bite to eat.

Karen Eng at the closing event at TEDGlobal 2009 • TED/James Duncan Davidson

Karen wasn’t just the bit of glue that kept cards moving smoothly between the media room and Robert and I. She also communicated valuable bits of information back and forth, helping to keep things coordinated. For example, when there were important times to get photos back to the media room, she’d let us know when those were. She also provided helpful status updates to the question—always on my mind—of how well the photographs I was delivering were meeting expectations and needs. Throughout, she kept things light and fun with great banter while making sure to keep an eye on the things that I couldn’t.

Mike Femia in the Media Room at TEDGlobal 2009 • TED/James Duncan Davidson

Once the photos were delivered to the media room and ingested, our photo editor Mike Femia took over. Seated at his workstation with a huge 30" screen and wielding Photo Mechanic, he split out the incoming files into appropriate groups, applied captions, and then sorted out selects to push to all of the various places they needed to end up. One of these destination was the Flickr stream. Another was the TED Blog, which needed fresh photos to illustrate their coverage of the event. For example, here’s a shot of William Kamkwamba as it appears on the blog:

Simply splitting photos and pipelining them between Flickr and internal users is tricky enough. But, there was a very important third destination for our photographs: the global news organizations. As part of the workflow, Mike was also sending out images to a site where various news organizations would pick them up and run with their stories about TEDGlobal. Here’s a shot of the same image from above of William Kamkwamba as it appeared on the BBC website:

Let me tell you, I’ve seen my fair share of workflows and this one is right up there at the top as far as all the requirements pulling at it. Public web distribution via Flickr, team blog support, and news distribution. I wish I could say that some single tool just made this easy, but when it’s at this level, it’s not about tools anymore. It’s about having all the right people in play. The guy who made sure to keep all of use co-ordinated and running smoothly, while at the same time working with the video team, was Michael Glass.

Michael Glass in the Media Room at TEDGlobal 2009 • TED/James Duncan Davidson

For most of the conferences I shoot, I’m working solo and juggling the responsibilities of photographer, photo editor, and publisher. But for a TED conference, there’s no way that would work. It took all five of us—Michael, Mike, Karen, Robert, and myself—operating within the much larger group of people putting on the conference to cover things. Even so, at the end of four days of non-stop photo creation and pipelining, we were all smooshed. It took giving it all we had to get things done. It was one hell of a team. I was honored to be a part of it, and I can only hope to do it again!