TIGA Feats

Last week I was at the annual TIGA Games Industry Awards to photograph the gathered great and good and the award winners in particular.

TIGA is the non-profit trade association which represents the digital games industry in the UK, and this year’s awards were presented at The Assembly Rooms in Bath, a historic venue contrasting with the relatively new art of game design.

I’ve covered a few events at the Assembly Rooms over the years, and though it’s a lovely building it’s always quite tricky to deal with the very low-level, yellow lighting in the Great Octagon (see this post on a similar recent challenge), where delegates gather for drinks prior to being seated in the main ballroom which, depending on what the lighting guys have set up, will be a whole new challenge.

Normally I’ll use on-camera flash of some sort for the drinks reception, and then portable studio lights directed at the stage to cover the dais and awards presentations up on the stage, but this time I decided to use available light for the drinks bit, and hand-held flash for the awards as I had to be super-quick for the presentations. The client didn’t want the photography to hold up proceeedings. There were a lot of awards being presented, and I needed to be nimble to get a shot from each one – the studio lights can slow me down as they don’t always charge back up fast enough to be ready for the next photo.

In between covering the flavour of the evening and the awards on the stage, I was also nipping backstage to send images out from my laptop in order that social media coverage could have pictures live on the night.

A pretty long night and tiring too, but great fun and an interesting insight into the gaming industry. I’ll be back at The Assembly Rooms before the month is out to cover the Regen SW Green Energy Awards. I can’t wait to see what the lighting engineers do this time…

In the meantime, here’s a small selection of images from the night:

Delegates mingle and drink prior to dinner and the awards

Social media was broadcast live to the room

Capturing the fun of the evening

Compere Corey Johnson, actor and games voice artist, keeps proceedings flowing

Awards are presented, speeches are made