Adelaide Awards Night Photographer - Mitsubishi Motors Australia
Mitsubishi Motors Australia returned to South Australia for their annual Dealer, Sales and Service Awards - this time at the Adelaide Convention Centre, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking straight out onto Adelaide Oval. It's becoming something of a tradition for us. Frankie shot their awards night at the Oval last year, and we've covered their car launches at the Mitsubishi office in between - so by this point, photographing Mitsubishi is less about figuring out who they are and more about refining how we shoot them.
Project Facts
Client: Mitsubishi Motors Australia
Industry: Automotive
Location: Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide
Shoot Type: Corporate awards night photography
Duration: Full evening coverage
Crew: 1 (Lewis Whittenbury — lead photographer)
Objective: Capture award presentations, guest reactions and brand-critical media wall imagery across a formal dealer, sales and service awards dinner
Approach: Stage and floor coverage balancing challenging branded lighting conditions with candid guest documentation
Lighting: Aputure 600D with Godox lantern for media wall. Handheld Godox AD100Pro for hard flash for wider lens. Venue red up-lighting and Mitsubishi branded signage.
Deliverables: Curated awards night gallery for internal communications, dealer network recognition and marketing use
Usage: Corporate communications, dealer network materials, internal recognition
This year's awards spanned the full spectrum — Dealer of the Year, Sales Excellence, Service Excellence, and a set of special Japanese-origin awards that carry a different kind of formality to the rest of the night. Around 15 tables, which for a venue the size of the Adelaide Convention Centre felt intimate rather than cavernous — a tighter, more controlled room than the scale of the venue might suggest.
The lighting brief: red, low, and unforgiving
If there's one thing worth knowing about photographing a Mitsubishi event, it's the lighting. The brand leans heavily into deep reds — up-lighting, branded pull-up banners, a Mitsubishi media wall — and on stage specifically, the combination of low ambient light and saturated red up-lights makes for one of the trickier lighting environments we shoot in regularly. Red light is notoriously difficult to expose for correctly without either blowing out skin tones or losing all the shadow detail in a dinner suit. The stage was, without question, the hardest part of the night to get right.
The setup on our end was a single lantern positioned behind me for the awards/media wall segment, balanced against the venue's red up-lighting and the brand's own media wall lighting.. Getting clean, true-to-colour shots of award recipients standing in front of branded signage while red light floods the rest of the stage is a genuinely technical problem, and it's the kind of detail that separates a serviceable gallery from one a marketing team can actually use across their channels without colour correction headaches. Hence why we then move people off to the media wall.
The highlight: Peter Rowsthorn working the room
Every awards night has one moment that makes the whole evening. This year it was Peter Rowsthorn - yes, Kath and Kim's Kel - on hosting duties, riffing through a string of genuinely funny car jokes regarding his daughter’s blue Mitsubishi that had the room properly laughing between award categories. Photographing a professional comedian working a corporate room is its own particular skill - timing the shutter to the punchline rather than the setup, watching for the moment the audience reaction peaks rather than just the moment Peter is mid-sentence. Those reaction shots - table after table cracking up at the same beat - are often more valuable to a brand's internal communications than the formal award handover photos themselves.
The media wall that almost didn't make it
Here's the bit that didn't show up in any photo but very nearly changed the whole night. Simon, our partnerships contact at Mitsubishi, flies the branded media wall to each event himself - and this time he hit a snag at check-in over the wall's size, despite having flown the exact same setup through on previous occasions without issue. We compared notes afterwards - I've flown oversized equipment cases through plenty of domestic flights myself without drama - and the best guess either of us could land on was a simple overbooked flight rather than any actual policy change. It's the kind of behind-the-scenes logistics hiccup that never makes it into a final gallery, but it's exactly the sort of thing that determines whether a shoot goes smoothly or turns into a scramble twenty minutes before doors open. In this case, the wall arrived, the screens got sorted, and the night went off without a hitch - but it's a reminder that half of event photography happens before a single frame is taken.
Why the ongoing relationship matters
This is now our third type of engagement with Mitsubishi Motors Australia across two years — Frankie shooting their awards night at Adelaide Oval, our team covering car launches at their Adelaide office, and now this year's awards at the Convention Centre. That kind of repeat, varied engagement with one brand is exactly what we look for in a long-term client relationship — it means we're not relearning their brand guidelines, their tone, or their lighting preferences from scratch every time. We know Mitsubishi leans red. We know their media wall needs its own lighting plan. We know the kind of energy their dealer network brings to an awards night versus the more controlled tone of a product launch.
Frankie The Creative has photographed Mitsubishi Motors Australia across awards nights and product launches in Adelaide. If your organisation needs a photography team that understands brand-specific lighting requirements and can adapt to the unique technical demands of your event, get in touch.
