Event Coverage

Roaming coverage, not a corner of the room

A roaming photographer works the whole event rather than one lit corner of it. There is no queue, no backdrop, and nobody has to decide whether the photo is worth leaving their table for. We move through the night, shoot what is actually happening, and keep going while the room changes: arrivals, speeches, the first half hour when everyone still looks arranged, and the part later on when they do not.

That is the difference between event coverage and a photo booth. A booth is a fixed point that people come to, and it only records the people who chose to come. Roaming coverage records the event.

How your guests get the photographs

This is the part that works differently here, and it is worth reading properly because it changes what you hand your guests on the night.

Every event gets its own album on this site, with its own six digit access code. The code is handed out on the night, on a card, to anyone you want to have it. Guests type it in, the gallery opens, and they download the frames they want at full resolution. No account to create, no app, no watermark, and no charge to them. Commercial use is included, so a guest who wants to use a frame for their own business can.

The practical effect is that you are not the distribution channel. You do not end up forwarding a folder to eighty people, and nobody has to ask you twice for the one photo they actually wanted. The album stays up, so the guest who thinks of it a fortnight later still gets it.

Albums are gated on the server, not in the browser. Full resolution files are never served directly from a public folder, and every request passes a code check before anything is handed over. Without the code an album shows no photographs and no image paths at all.

Stills, not frames pulled from video

Every frame in an album is a photograph taken with a stills camera. None of it is grabbed out of video footage, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a limitation.

A dedicated stills camera captures far more light and resolution per frame than a video grab can. It is the reason the files hold up when you crop hard, print them, or put one on a wall at size. A frame lifted from video looks acceptable on a phone and falls apart the moment it is asked to do anything else.

What the day actually looks like

Shot on professional mirrorless bodies, with a second body on hand at every event. That is not a specification for its own sake. It means a lens change or a failure mid speech does not cost you the speech.

Coverage runs at an hourly rate or a flat event rate, whichever suits the shape of the night, and it is agreed before anything is booked. Editing is done inside five days and the album goes up complete rather than in instalments, so there is one link and one code to hand out rather than a trickle of updates.

Events this suits

The delivery model matters most when a lot of people at the event want the photographs, not just whoever is paying for them. That describes most private and community events:

• Milestone birthdays, including 18ths, 21sts, 30ths, 40ths and 50ths
• Engagement parties
• School formals and presentation nights
• University balls and society events
• Christenings, naming days and family gatherings
• Corporate functions, launches and awards nights

Based in Melbourne and travelling across the metropolitan area and regional Victoria. If your event sits outside that, ask anyway and we will tell you honestly whether it is workable.

Against a photo booth, honestly

A booth is often the thing this replaces, so here is a fair comparison rather than a sales one.

A booth is better at one specific thing: the guest walks away holding a print, in the moment, and that print goes on a fridge. If that instant physical object is the point of your night, hire a booth. It also entertains people during a lull, which a roaming photographer does not.

What a booth cannot do is cover the event. It sees whoever queued for it, against the same backdrop, in the same light, for the hours it is switched on. It does not get the speech, the room before anyone sat down, or the two people talking at the far table. And what your guests take home is a strip sized for a strip, not a file they can print at size years later.

Roaming coverage with code based guest downloads is the other trade: no print in the hand on the night, and every guest gets every frame at full resolution instead. Both are defensible. They are just not the same product, and booths are frequently quoted at a similar number to a photographer, which is worth knowing while you compare.

What you should ask before booking anyone

Three questions worth putting to any event photographer, including us. Who is allowed to download the photographs, and does that include your guests or only you. What resolution do they get, and is it the file the camera made or a version compressed for the web. And how long does the gallery stay up.

Our answers are: anyone with the code, the full resolution edit, and it stays up. If a quote you are comparing does not answer those three clearly, that is worth knowing before you sign it.

To get a number for your event, tell us the date, the venue, roughly how many people and how many hours you want covered. Every engagement is scoped and quoted against what you actually need rather than sold as a package that half fits.