One of my big clients is Honda.  On the 16th February, I attended their annual awards night where they give out awards to the best staff within the group.  This year it was held at The Corinthia Hotel in Londons Whitehall.

The hotel is absolutely first class and is a venue that many celebrities use. Whilst setting my equipment up Will I Am the singer and music producer was there having a drink with a friend…the paparazzi were close by.

I got to the venue around 5.30pm to start the official shoot at 7 pm.  I photograph this event every year for them and I always take my event printer and Mac so that we can produce an image on the night for every person to take home with them.  As well as photograph the main picture which was a group shot of the 62 staff I also had to take informal drinks pics and the actual awards ceremony at around 10.30 pm.

So I met with Emma from Honda finance and we arranged to get access to The Royal Presidential Suite for the Official shot and the hotel very kindly gave us use of it.

6 pm. Took the printer and Mac up into a conference room that had been organised for me and also took the camera equipment in and got everything set up and working correctly.

6.30 pm. Didi a quick test so that when I took the main picture we would be ready to go with no problems.

7 pm.  Started taking the pictures of everyone chatting and drinking then at 7.30 I went up to The Royal Presidential Suite and set up on the terrace with the london skyline beautifully framed and ready for the people. The view of London was absolutely breathtaking.

7.45 pm. I took the picture of all the staff by standing on a table and shot the picture using a tripod with an exposure of  1 second at F11 at 400 ISO using a Nikon D4s with one main flash and two remote triggered off camera flash units.

 

I then left my assistant to go and take a few pictures of the people during the beginning of the meal whilst I downloaded the Image and then began to get it ready for printing.

We started the print run and whilst this was running Emma from Honda had arranged for food to come up and we sat and enjoyed the most beautiful meal.

The prints were now all mounted and ready and we went down and gave them to the Client.  They were all very impressed with the picture – but then when you have a view as nice as that its hard for it to not look good.

10.30 pm. The awards were given out and there were some amazing speeches.

We then packed the equipment away and said goodbye to the clients and took a nice easy drive home. What a brilliant evening for such a successful company at one of the most beautiful hotels I’ve ever worked at…have to pinch myself sometimes.

Before leaving I took a picture from the terrace of The London Eye.. this was taken 4 seconds at F8 200 ISO Camera Nikon D4s Lens 16 mm Nikon F2.8.

 

Photographed and written by John Paul ODonnell © John Paul ODonnell Photography.