By the time the room is fully alive, I stop deciding where to stand and start chasing what's moving.
An event with this production level gives you a specific photographic problem: there are too many things happening at once, and all of them are worth a frame. The aerial performer is twenty feet up, fully inverted, the crowd below her watching and not watching, some faces up, some mid-conversation, some not yet aware she's there. The stilt walker is moving through the same floor space. The DJ is running the energy from the booth. And the crowd is doing what crowds do when they've had two hours to settle in and the music is right.
The wide frame is the only answer. I pulled back far enough to get the performer and the crowd in the same image, and waited for the moment when the two things were in the right relationship to each other. The aerial performer inverted, legs extended, the full room behind her: that's the frame that tells the story of the evening more completely than any close portrait could.
"There are too many things happening at once. You stop deciding where to stand and start following what the room is doing."
The aerial silk performer worked through her full routine three times during the evening. Each pass was different because the crowd was different. Early in the night the floor had space in it, people still finding their positions. By the second hour the floor had closed in and the crowd was looking up more often. The frame I wanted was the one where the performer and the crowd were in genuine relationship with each other, not just occupying the same room. That image happened at the top of the second hour.
The solo frame. Just the performer and the room she's working.
The floor at capacity. The stilt walker still finding space in it.
The LED wing dancer appeared about midway through the evening. She moved through the crowd with the wings fully extended and lit, teal and then blue depending on the moment, and the crowd opened around her the way crowds do when something unexpected is in the room. The photographs of her are some of the most technically demanding from the night: fast movement, complex practical lighting, a dark background with bright point sources scattered through it. I shot in bursts and kept the best three frames from each pass.
The upstairs view is always worth climbing for. From above, the crowd becomes geometry: the spacing between people, the clusters of conversation, the empty corridors that form and close. None of that is visible from the floor. I went up twice during the evening, once at an hour in, once closer to the end, and the two views tell different stories about how a crowd uses a room over the course of a night.
The floor at its loosest. Nobody performing for the camera.
From above. This is how full the room actually was.
The wings open. The crowd makes room.
The couple I photographed near the end of the evening had clearly built their outfits around this specific event. Her headpiece was a full branching structure of dried flowers and blooms. His trousers were metallic blue. They stood still for about thirty seconds while I made the frame, and then they were back in the crowd. Events like this one draw people who take the occasion seriously, who dress for it, who understand that dressing for a gala is itself a form of participation. That couple understood it completely.
The through-the-mirror-ball frame was the last image I made before calling the night. I'd been looking for it for two hours: the right position above the crowd where the mirror ball's facets would frame the room below without obscuring it. When I found it, the floor was still full, the DJ was still running, and the room showed no signs of stopping. I made a few frames and went to find the exit.
They dressed for the room. The room deserved it.
The last frame of the night. The floor still going.
Gala & Fundraiser Photography →
Photography: Raoul Brown