On Saturday, September 19, Matson employees and their families spent the morning pulling trash off the Oakland shoreline for California Coastal Cleanup Day. I photographed it. Grabbers, five gallon buckets, a stretch of marsh off Oakport Street, and a few hundred pieces of garbage that are no longer headed into the bay.
Why a volunteer day is worth photographing properly
Most companies put real money and a real Saturday into a volunteer day, then walk away with a folder of phone snapshots. That is a shame, because this is some of the most useful imagery a company can own. It goes in the annual report and the ESG section, it goes on the careers page where it does more recruiting work than any stock photo, and it is the rare corporate content that people actually want to share, because they are in it.
The difference between a phone snapshot and a usable frame is not the camera. It is being in the right place when somebody laughs, and knowing that the picture of a person holding up what they just found tells the story better than a wide shot of a parking lot.
Flat light, no backdrop, everybody moving
A cleanup is harder to shoot than a ballroom. Overcast bay light is flat and gray, there is no backdrop and nowhere to put one, the ground is rock and pickleweed, and nobody is standing still or looking at you. You get one pass at each moment.
That is squarely photojournalism work, which is what I did for fifteen years before I did much of anything else. Anticipate the moment, expose for the face against a bright sky, stay out of the way, and keep the frames clean enough that the marketing team can crop them three different ways later.
A shipping company cleaning the shoreline
Matson has been a client of mine for years, across headshots and corporate events, so it was good to photograph them doing this. The alignment is not something anyone had to manufacture for a press release: an ocean shipping company spending a Saturday cleaning the water it works on. That is a story you can tell in pictures without a single line of copy.
Booking a volunteer day
If your company runs a volunteer day, a build day, a beach or creek cleanup, or a food bank shift, it is worth putting a photographer on it. A half day is usually plenty, it produces a year of website, recruiting and report imagery, and it is the easiest corporate shoot there is to enjoy.
Planning one? See corporate event photography, or get in touch for a quote. Half days from $2,000, full days from $3,500.