The Dunn School of Pathology, part of the University of Oxford, was the setting for yesterday's assignment. Chaired by Professor Denis Noble, it was a discussion about the challenges faced by scientists in obtaining funding for their research. This blog post, however, is about the lesser challenges of photographing such an event. The brief was to produce photos of the participants engaging in debate, but not during the actual debate itself, which was being filmed by Voices from Oxford. (You can see the full discussion here: http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/video/round-table-discussion-on-science-policy/788.) So I had take the opportunities that presented themselves before and after the debate proper, and this turned out to be sufficient to fulfil the brief. I arrived rather early, even by my standards, so I can report that the latte in the cafe is superb!

Now I know from past experience that the lighting in these situations can be difficult; in this particular room, the only light came from a circular skylight and a small video light - good enough for the film crew, but not for the high quality images I had in mind. Fortunately, I'd brought along a portable flash setup comprising a stand, a small umbrella, and a speedlight - just as well, because without the flash, I'd have been forced to crank up the ISO to the detriment of image quality. With the flash on half power, I was able to shoot at 1/200 at f5.6 and ISO400. The flash was powered by a lithium ion external power pack, giving recycling times of a second or so, compared with several seconds had I just been relying on the internal AA batteries.

Quite often, backgrounds can be cluttered and intrusive; not here, where there was a lovely blue curtain behind the speakers - perfect!

Here's a full list of the kit that I used:

• Canon 5DMkIII
• Canon 24-70 f2.8L lens
• Canon 600EX II RT Speedlight
• Quantum Turbo RC external battery pack for the speedlight
• Canon Speedlight transmitter ST-E3-RT
• Brolly and stand

Back at the computer, the post-processing workflow is straightforward. Import the RAW images from the card into Lightroom, skipping the obviously unusable ones. Then I make a second pass through the images to choose the ones that make the final cut. Since the exposure and light balance were pretty well spot-on in camera, there's not much additional processing to do. Just a bit of cropping where appropriate, and pulling the highlight slider down a little to reveal more detail in Matthew's white shirt. Then export as full size JPEGs with standard sharpening applied, and upload to the Zenfolio gallery for the client to view. Job done, in under an hour!