Eighteen years of corporate photography and video in Portugal

I have been doing corporate photography and video in Portugal for eighteen years. Syncview was founded on 30 September 2008, and today is the date, so I am writing what I rarely write: not about one job, but about what eighteen years of jobs taught me.

I will skip the origin story. What matters is what hasn't changed: I photograph and film the real work companies do, where it actually happens, with nothing staged. A factory in production, a dry dock in Setúbal with the hull fully exposed, a room with four hundred people sitting and listening. That is the material.

Almost all the gear has changed. File sizes changed, low-light performance changed, the drone arrived and brought with it a point of view that used to require a helicopter. Above all the deadline changed: today part of the photographs from an event go out while the event is still running, edited and sent so the communications team can publish the same day, and the rest arrives the following day. None of this changed the essential part, which is being in the right place, paying enough attention to see what is worth recording.

The work is still organised around four fronts. Corporate events, from conferences and conventions to institutional ceremonies, in Lisbon and outside Portugal. Industrial and naval photography, which in my case runs largely through the shipyard in Setúbal, on the river Sado, and through the factories willing to open the door to a camera. Corporate portraits, the area where the change is most visible to the person being photographed. And aerial drone photography, which is now a language of its own rather than an accessory.

If I have to reduce eighteen years to three lessons, these are they. First: being present is worth more than owning the best gear, because the moment does not wait for the right lens. Second: the best photograph of a company is almost always the one showing the people who work there, not the space or the machine on their own. Third, the most prosaic one and the one that kept the most clients: delivering on time is part of the job, not an extra to be negotiated afterwards.

To mark the date I finally got something done that had been overdue for years, the new syncview.pt. Built from scratch, bilingual in Portuguese and English, with the portfolio organised by field, case studies that tell the full story of each project instead of only showing the pretty frame, and this Journal, where I write about how the work actually gets done. It was the first time in many years that I stopped to look at the whole archive in one go, and choosing what made the cut was harder than I expected.

In eighteen years I have walked into factories, dry docks, stages and boardrooms because someone called me in. Thank you to everyone who called. And above all to those who saw the results and called again. That is how eighteen years are built, one job at a time.

On to the next ones. If you have a job to do, get in touch.