Opening ceremonies followed by a guided site tour

Many openings follow the ceremony with a walk through the site. Guests see the new facility, the owner points out features and the press may ask questions along the way. It is a good format for visitors and a demanding one for photography, because the two parts have almost nothing in common.

This guide sits within our overview of commercial opening and milestone photography. If your opening is spread over several floors, read openings across several floors or zones as well.

Treat the ceremony and the tour as separate briefs

The ceremony is fixed. People stand in agreed positions, there is a stage or a front line and the timing is tight. The tour is fluid. The group walks, stops and moves on, the guide talks and spaces change.

Write one short brief for each part. For the ceremony, list the moments, the people and the positions. For the tour, list the stops, what each stop shows and which people are expected. This avoids the common problem of a single vague instruction, such as "cover the opening", being applied to two different jobs.

The handover between the two

The moment between the last ceremony item and the first tour step is easy to lose. Guests leave their seats, speakers step down and the group forms. Decide who calls the group, where it assembles and how long it waits.

A short pause for a group image at the end of the ceremony can also help. Our guide to timing group photographs around the event flow covers when to take it so the tour is not delayed.

Access along the route

A tour route can cross areas with very different rules: a clean production floor, a plant room, a tenant's showroom, a car park, an open yard. The operator, or a tenant, decides what may be photographed in each.

Ask for a marked plan of the route. Mark any area that is restricted, any that requires protective equipment and any where flash or movement is limited. Our venue photography checklist helps you record the answers, and our guide to planning photographs in a venue with several floors explains the questions.

Who matters at each stage?

Priorities often shift between the two parts. At the ceremony, the senior guests and the host are central. On the tour, the people who explain the site, such as operations leads or project managers, may be more important, and so may the guests' reactions.

Agree who decides if a priority conflicts. A named contact on the day removes arguments mid-route.

Keeping the tour moving

The photographer should be ahead of the group at each stop, take the agreed images and step aside. A short pause is acceptable. A long one is not. If a stop is for a group image, the guide announces it so that guests expect it.

Where corridors are narrow or stairs are used, plan the order of movement with the site team. Safety rules come before photographs.

A hypothetical example

For example, imagine an opening of a new regional office at 10am, with a ribbon and two speeches lasting twenty minutes, followed by a forty-minute tour of the reception, open-plan floor, meeting rooms and a rooftop terrace. The operator marks the server room as not photographable.

The plan puts the photographer at the front for the ceremony. After a group image, the photographer moves ahead to the open-plan floor, then the meeting rooms, then the terrace, photographing the guide, the guests and the space. A closing image on the terrace ends coverage at 11.15am.

What to tell the photographer

• The ceremony run sheet and the tour route.
• Restricted areas and safety rules.
• Stop points and group image locations.
• The guide and the on-site contact.
• Who decides priorities during the tour.

We confirm the date, venue, crew and deliverables in writing. Our guide to coverage between formal programme items explains how we use the gaps.