As a social media manager and part of the marketing team for my high school's student council year, I had the opportunity to capture the water balloon festival, one of our school's traditional events to end the school year.
The goal I set for this series was to put in the frame both the beauty of pre-event preparation and the students' reactions during the event. The first half of the series focuses more on making the preparation process look aesthetically pleasing to provoke a sense that behind every successful event is the hard work of the event planning team, which also needs to be embraced and celebrated. The second half focuses on capturing the peak moment of joy, laughter, and interactions between students during the festival.
Not all projects turn out as perfectly as I imagined. There were several challenges I had to face such as learning how to freeze motion and always be on the look for the interesting moment as the festival involves multiple activities and sometimes the right moment happens when I look away. But on the other hand, the challenges did push me to grow and sharpen my photography skills.
Overall, this hands-on experience being an event photographer opened me up to completely new perspectives as capturing it allowed me to be more present and attentive to what was happening. This made me realize that being present is important for every artist as inspirations often come from nowhere but our living environment.
