On September 30, 2026, Apollo took over SFJAZZ Center for ApolloNEXT, its annual go-to-market conference, and I photographed the day. CEO Matt Curl gave the keynote and announced three products: Apollo Builder Studio, the Apollo Intelligence Layer and Apollo Messaging OS. The rest of the program ran from product deep dives to a conversation with the San Jose Earthquakes, with the Earthquakes mascot making an appearance.
Photographing a keynote in a concert hall
SFJAZZ Center is built for music, not slides. The Miner Auditorium wraps the audience around the stage on three sides, the house lights go fully dark, and the set was a wall of saturated green, pink and violet. That is a gift and a problem at once. The color makes every frame look like the brand, but a speaker lit by the screen behind them is a speaker in the dark unless you expose for the face and let the background go where it wants.
My approach is to work the keynote from three positions: the center for the clean slide-plus-speaker frame that ends up in the press release, the wings for the tight expressions, and a step back for the frames that show the room.
Everything that is not the stage
A product conference is also a lobby, a photo wall and a few hundred conversations between sessions. Those frames are the ones the people in them share, and the ones recruiting uses a year later.
Booking conference coverage in San Francisco
I photograph user conferences, product launches and keynotes across the Bay Area, from Moscone to venues like SFJAZZ Center, and in convention cities nationwide. See San Francisco conference photography and product launch photography. For multi-day or multi-room programs that need more than one photographer, see photography production, or get in touch for a quote. Half days from $2,000, full days from $3,500.