Day 37: Social Banquet

2026-03-15

Limited permission was granted to use photos taken for these events on this site.

Hello! Yet another old event photo from my time at school. This will be the last one for a while.

I upload these photos to create a written archive of my past work in one place, and to store memories of interesting school events and lessons learned before I forget them.

I don't archive my emails, and to this day, I haven't figured out an intuitive way to set up a permanent storage for emails. But if memory serves, an email was my ticket into event photography as a consistent duty. I showed up to my first event and took photos, then sent them to the relevant media staff at my school, asking to take more photos. That more-or-less describes my relationship with the school today; I offer to take photos, and I show up and take photos. Then I ask to take more. They haven't said no to me yet...!

When meeting with the media staff, I ask for their feedback and their personal guidelines regarding photography. One of the immediate mentalities that I developed for event photography was, "take shots of everything — literally everything — except of people eating, because that's gross." Which proved to be quite the creative challenge for this banquet event.

My weakness is taking personal photos of people, but many of my photos from that day were of people socializing and moving around. I took shots of people standing up to talk, and to one person giving a toast. All I had to do was avoid half-eaten food and the mess of a casual dinner.

All things considered, it went better than I expected. It made me conscious of where I pointed my camera, and I felt like the sound of the shutter in my camera was amplified that day, but otherwise, it went fine. I stressed about nothing.

Finally, I've got some music recommendations. This time, there's a lot of tracks to listen to. Every month or so, Louie Zong on Bandcamp publishes a free-to-download album of weird but fun music. Even after sorting through them, I've stored more than four hundred songs that I like. Louie Zong is known for his various Ghost Songs and accompanying animations on YouTube, but "the golden hour" (and the rest of the album "here") just makes me feel good.

Cheers,
David