Snap Lens Fest 2025: augmented reality comes to life in Los Angeles

Snapchat hired me directly to photograph Lens Fest 2025 at its headquarters in Los Angeles. The brief was all of it: speakers, Lens Studio demos, creators, audience reactions, activations, and the branded spaces around the building.

The event ran upstairs and downstairs. Some of the activations were low lit, but it wasn't anything I'm not used to. The keynotes were small, and the audience was a selected group of tech-savvy people rather than a huge conference crowd.

That changes how the room reads in photographs. The scale comes from the closeness between the speakers, demos, and audience instead of a giant stage, so I covered the reactions and conversations along with the formal sessions.

The most interesting part for me was shooting close-ups of the different versions of Snap's Spectacles and seeing how they had evolved. Those product details were part of the story, not just filler between keynote photographs.

Snapchat wanted the photographs the next day. My understanding was that the files were for social and internal use.