Photographing TEDGlobal 2009

I’ve been in Oxford, England for the last week working the TEDGlobal 2009 conference. While this conference was smaller in terms of attendee numbers than TED 2009 in Long Beach, it was still the same kind of event in every other way. 4 action packed days across four different venues filled with 13 blocks of main sessions, 2 TED U sessions (for audience members to present at), and evening events galore. In other words, it was just as challenging a shoot as any other TED.

Chris Anderson on Stage at TEDGlobal 2009 • TED/James Duncan Davidson

This time around, I was the main stage photographer. That means that it was my responsibility to get great shots of every single speaker that took the TED stage to give a presentation. No pressure. On top of that, due to the sheer volume of photographs this kind of event generates and the multiple uses they were put to use for—the TEDGlobal 2009 Flickr stream, the TED Blog, and released to the media—I had to shoot a RAW+JPEG workflow so that the media team could quickly route releasable images to the various sources. It is only now, after the event has finished, that I’m even getting a chance to start looking at the RAW files I took.

To enable the RAW+JPEG workflow and try to get the best possible JPEG files from camera, I set my D700s up with a vivid picture control setting with one click less saturation. Active D-Lighting was set to normal. And, I set the white balance using a ExpoDisc to pull a pure white point from the main stage lights and then added one click more blue to it to compensate a bit for the warmth of the minor lights and the bounce fill off the big red carpet under the speakers. The media team and I went back and forth a bit to arrive at these settings, and I’m probably going to prefer the processing I can do in post off the RAW files, but it was a very workable solution given all the time pressures involved.

It’ll take a bit of time, however, to get to the photos that I’ll want to try working up for my portfolio. I’ve got about 400GB of data to dig through. Something like 25% of that total is made up of the in-camera JPEG files, but still. It’s a monster amount of data to sift through.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Stage at TEDGlobal 2009 • TED/James Duncan Davidson

Another interesting challenge in this event’s photography was the fact that we had the current Prime Minister of the UK on stage during the first day in a surprise appearance. His presence on-site brought with it a set of security rules that had to be followed by the staff and there were some special notes that applied to photography. By no means were these rules onerous or out of line, but I did have to do a bit of pre-planning for my positions before and during the session as well as my movement between those points. I certainly didn’t want to add “Tackled by the PM’s security detail” to my list of TED stories.

By the way, I know that many of my UK friends have loads of negative things to say about Gordon Brown. I thought, however, his TED Talk was well considered and well given. The message he gave on stage (without a teleprompter, by the way) is a good one and worthy of consideration, even if you’re not a supporter of the man or his party. I digress however, and I’m certainly not wanting to get started on a political discussion in the comments. Suffice it to say that photographing this particular talk was definitely a highlight of the week. One of many.

In any case, after this week’s work, I’m totally knackered, as the locals say. More to come... But first, I’ve got to recover from a long week and process some photographs.