Photographing college graduation

2015grads

example gallery from weebly
example gallery from weebly

I was asked to photograph the Los Medanos College 2015 graduation ceremony a couple of days ago. It happened to be the largest one they had yet and that meant over 400 graduates! Needless to say I have over 2,000 images I needed to whittle down through and make sure I tried to show most everyone while still capturing the fun of the event. We use these photos not only to document the night but they are great marketing pieces to remind potential students what they are working towards.

The trick to getting maximum exposure is to get through these photos fast before the momentum of the event wears off and that is where some handy software can help. I used Adobe lightroom to quickly star the photos I was going to keep based on the thumbnails. Then I batched adjusted the exposure on some that were a little light struck. Then I did a little cropping and then exported them as decent sized jpegs.

Here is where the cool part comes in. To make a web gallery or a slideshow can take hours but not so when you use the free templates that weebly offers you. They offer free blogs and web hosting and what’s even cooler is you can download the pages and keep a copy for hosting elsewhere.

Another free little tool I just found out about is Pro Show Web that allows you to quickly make a slideshow with 15 images or less and set it to music.

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4 thoughts on “Photographing college graduation

  • May 22, 2015 at 6:41 pm
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    You do a great job with such a large undertaking! That’s why you are asked to do the shoot! Once again, you did so well!

  • May 22, 2015 at 7:21 pm
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    Wow, great work!

  • May 25, 2015 at 8:06 pm
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    Fabulous shots and published results, Eloine. Thanks for the tips on the cool and useful softwares available.

  • June 3, 2015 at 8:45 am
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    Spectacular job of capturing the elation – and relief – of that big moment.

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