NAV CANADA Habs Playoff Campaign – Photography and Timelapse in Montreal

After photographing NAV CANADA’s conference in Montreal, I was asked by the organization’s social media and communications team to take stills photography and video footage for a rather more unusual assignment.

In May 2025, Montreal was caught up in the excitement of the Canadiens‘ return to the Stanley Cup Playoffs—the team’s first postseason appearance in four years. Although the Habs’ playoff run ultimately ended in the first round against the Washington Capitals, the return to the postseason generated plenty of excitement around the city.

NAV CANADA got into the spirit by wrapping a huge banner supporting the team around the air traffic control tower at Montréal–Trudeau International Airport.

It’s not every day that you get to photograph a giant Habs banner wrapped around an airport control tower, so this was a particularly fun assignment.

My brief was to create still photographs for NAV CANADA’s social media and marketing communications, as well as capture video footage that could be turned into a timelapse. The photographs needed to show the scale and visibility of the installation, while the video would give a sense of the process and transformation as the banner went up.

Assignments like this are a good example of the variety of work involved in corporate photography and communications photography. The subject isn’t necessarily a conventional corporate event or a portrait of an executive. Sometimes the job is to document a communications campaign or a moment that an organization wants to share with its audience.

For NAV CANADA, the banner was a playful way of connecting the organization with the city and its hockey team at a particularly exciting time. Photographing it from different perspectives helped create a set of images that could work across social media, marketing and internal communications.

I also captured raw video footage during the installation, which was subsequently turned into a timelapse. This is something I increasingly enjoy incorporating into photography assignments: relatively simple footage can provide an additional way for a client to communicate the scale and impact of a project, without requiring a separate full video production.

The result was a combination of still photography and moving imagery documenting an unusual piece of Montreal’s 2025 Canadiens playoff fever—and a pretty memorable sight for anyone arriving at the airport.

You can see how NAV CANADA used the images here, and the timelapse video you can see on Instagram or below.

The timelapse had over 300,000 views on the day NAV Canada posted it – not too shabby!