Pro edition
Run of Show.
The demo marks one event's run of show. This is the blank instrument — six fields to fill in, 17 shots that follow from them, and the same-night workflow that makes a before-midnight delivery possible rather than aspirational.
Six fields per row
- Time
- 24-hour, to five minutes
- Not "morning". A camera position is a decision about a particular minute.
- What happens
- One line, plain
- "Award 3 of 7, sponsor presents" is useful. "Ceremony" is not.
- Where
- Room and stage side
- A photographer walking into the wrong room has missed it.
- Who
- Names, not titles
- And a face. Titles cannot be recognised across a dark auditorium.
- Must-have?
- Yes / no
- Marks which slots a camera may not leave. Usually three or four in a day.
- Clashes with
- Another row, or blank
- The only field that tells a photographer whether one camera is enough.
The shot list
Room
- Empty and branded
- Filling, from the back
- At capacity, from high if there is a balcony
Stage
- Each speaker, wide
- Each speaker, tight
- Speaker with the screen legible behind
Audience
- Reacting during the key moment
- Listening, mid-row
- Taking notes or photographing the screen
People
- Every named must-have, at least twice
- Two-person conversations at the break
- Hands, badges, programmes
Awards
- The handshake, once
- The staged portrait afterwards
- The trophy, alone, on a clean surface
Sponsors
- Each stand with a person at it
- Branding in a natural context, not photographed as a logo
Same-night workflow
- During the day Cull on the back of the camera between sessions Flagging as you go turns a two-hour evening edit into forty minutes.
- On leaving Two card copies before the car moves The only irreplaceable files you will ever handle. Nothing else on this page matters if this step is skipped.
- +30 min Ingest, select 20–30, nothing clever The social team needs correct and fast, not graded. Perfection tomorrow is worth less than adequate tonight.
- +90 min Exposure, white balance, crop, send A shared link, sized for social, named by moment rather than by frame number.
- Next morning The full working set By the time the office opens, which is when the press release goes.
Five things that go wrong without it
- No run of show, so the photographer follows the day instead of anticipating it.
- Must-have people identified by title rather than by face.
- A clash nobody flagged, discovered at the moment both things happen.
- The award portraits not staged, because nobody asked and the winners left.
- Delivery promised for "next week", by which time the event has stopped being news.
Timings assume a single-venue event within an hour of the studio. Multi-venue days need their own conversation and usually a second photographer.