Hackathon and developer event photography
Hackathons, demo days and developer events - shot dark, shot honestly, and edited to work in a sponsor deck.
Hackathons photograph badly by default. The lighting is whatever the venue has, most of the room is people looking at screens, and the interesting part - somebody working out that their idea does not work, and then that it does - happens quietly and does not repeat.
So I shoot them the way they look. Dark grounds, restrained colour, available light left where it fell. No ring light, no staged high-fives, no asking a team to pretend to point at a laptop.
What a hackathon edit has to do
- Give organisers a recap they can publish the same weekend
- Give the sponsor something worth pointing at for the next one
- Give participants frames they actually want to keep
- Hold up in a deck, a press release and on a wall
Sponsor branding in the frame, not on it
A logo dropped into a corner in post is obvious and it ages badly. Branding belongs in the composition: the wordmark on the backdrop, the stage colour, the signage moving people through the building. Built into the frame, it reads as documentary rather than advertising - and it survives being cropped for social.
That was the approach for the Claude Builder Club Spring 2026 hackathon at Northumbria University, sponsored by Anthropic and built around Claude. Three days, sixty-eight hero frames, delivered as a sequence rather than a dump of everything that moved.
Beyond Newcastle
The conference work is Newcastle-anchored. Hackathons are not - there are only so many in any one city, and the ones worth covering are wherever the community is. I travel for them, and for multi-day events I would rather quote travel and accommodation honestly than pad the day rate.
Running a hackathon?
Tell me the dates, the venue and whether there is a sponsor whose brand needs to read in the pictures. I will tell you what the coverage should be.
contact@harbium.studio