This July I was hired to provide the EU4Energy conference photography in Vienna, which lasted for two full days and also included a site visit to the Spittelau waste incineration plant.
For this conference I came to Vienna from Berlin the evening before the first day. I stayed literally next door to the hotel where the conference was taking place, which was actually quite a nice experience. Instead of travelling through the whole city with all of my equipment before a long working day, I could just walk over to the venue in the morning.
The conference itself was relatively small and quite cosy, with around 60 people attending. Various presenters came to the stage to talk about different energy-related topics, there were translators working during the sessions, discussions and questions from the audience.
At the same time, the atmosphere was quite relaxed and comfortable, which made it nice to photograph.
Photographing the first day of the conference
The first day was the main conference day, with presentations, networking sessions and discussions between the participants.
For the photography, I was moving between covering the speakers, reactions from the audience, wider photographs of the room and smaller moments during the networking sessions. As with most conference photography, I was trying to get enough variety without constantly distracting people from what was happening.
One slightly challenging part was the lighting.
The prettiest angle for photographing the speakers was also almost directly against the projector screen, which was very bright. At the same time, the existing lights in the room were not positioned particularly well for the people standing on stage.
Normally I can compensate for this with my own lighting, but during a conference I also have to work discreetly. Setting up lights pointing towards every speaker would have been far too distracting, so I had to work mostly with the light that was already there and balance the speakers against the much brighter screen behind them.
Site visit to Wien Energie Spittelau
After the morning conference sessions and a quick lunch, everyone got onto a bus for the site visit.
We went to the Spittelau waste incineration plant, operated by Wien Energie. I had actually never visited it before, despite living in Vienna previously and walking past it quite often. It is right next to a major transport hub, so I had seen the building many times but had never been inside.
This is one of the things I sometimes like about working as a photographer. My work brings me into places I was already curious about but somehow never found the time to visit myself.
There was a tour through the site and a shorter presentation about the work being done there. We could also go up to the rooftop, where there were beautiful views towards the centre of Vienna.
And, of course, the architecture itself is probably one of the most interesting parts of Spittelau. The building was redesigned by Hundertwasser and is quite stunning to see from close up.
Photographically, the site visit also gave me something very different from the conference room. Instead of photographing mostly speakers and discussions, I could work with the architecture, people moving through the building and the group interacting with the environment around them.
A different format on the second day
The first day lasted approximately ten hours. In the evening I went back to the hotel, backed up all of the pictures and prepared everything for the next morning.
The second day was a smaller session and had a very different setup.
Instead of presenters standing on a stage, there was a large table in the middle of the room with discussions happening between the participants. Some of the presenters were sitting together with everyone else, which made the whole session feel more like a working meeting.
Quite a few participants and presenters were also joining remotely through video calls.
That created another small photography challenge because they were only visible on the projector screen. I still made sure to photograph them, particularly because these images can be useful for internal communication and documenting who actually participated in the meeting.
At the same time, these are probably not the strongest photographs for visually representing the event itself, so I haven’t included many of them in this case study.
Two days of conference photography in Vienna
By the end of the second day I had photographed quite a wide range of situations: the main conference programme, speakers, audience reactions, networking, discussions, the site visit to Spittelau and the smaller working sessions on the second day.
It was also nice for me personally to return to Vienna for a few days. Since moving back to Berlin, I still like coming to the city from time to time, and travelling there for photography assignments gives me a good reason to do it.
For me, this was also a good example of how conference photography can go beyond photographing people standing on a stage. The programme changed quite a lot between the two days, and the visit to Spittelau added a completely different environment to the coverage.
I am now based in Berlin and photograph corporate events and conferences there, but I also travel to Vienna and other European cities for full-day and multi-day assignments.
If you are planning a conference, summit or institutional event in Berlin, Vienna or elsewhere in Europe, feel free to get in touch. I work discreetly, capture the important moments and deliver a clean, versatile gallery that is ready for communication afterwards.
