San Diego is a growing market for me, and a good share of what brings me here happens outdoors, which I am not complaining about. Working an open site teaches you a venue faster than a ballroom does, because there is nowhere to stand still and nothing between you and every decision you have to make.
This past June I photographed Heritage Fire San Diego at Ingram Plaza, the central lawn of the old Naval Training Center in Point Loma, now the district called Liberty Station. It was an afternoon of open-flame cooking stations, beverage tents, and a few thousand people wandering between them with a glass in one hand. Here is what Ingram Plaza gives you as a Liberty Station event venue, what the format demands, and what I would want to know before booking it.
Photographing a walk-around tasting at Liberty Station
Most venue spotlights I write come out of conferences, where there is a schedule and a stage and a client who can tell me which twenty minutes matter most. A walk-around tasting works on completely different terms. The whole thing is a crowd in motion between cooking stations, everyone facing whichever direction their next bite is in, and it stays that way from the first pour to the last.
What that means practically is that the event never comes to you. A chef finishes plating and hands somebody a dish, and if you were across the plaza looking the other way, that image does not exist. You miss things on every photography job no matter the format, so the answer is never to move faster. It is to be methodical about where you are and why.
The way I work an event like this is in blocks of intention. The first hour, before guests are let in, goes to details and to the chefs actually cooking. The next belongs to the brand requests and sponsor coverage, and after that I spend an hour on pours, wine, and people wine tasting. The last block is reserved for ambiance and guests interacting with each other. Inside any one of those blocks, I settle in on whatever is in front of me, wait for it to turn into the picture I want, and move on as soon as I have it.
That structure is the difference between a gallery that actually covers your event and four hours of whatever happened to be loudest.
It is also one of my favorite formats to shoot. An event built around open fire has something happening continuously for four straight hours, and chefs working over live flame in daylight is about as good as subject matter gets.
What Ingram Plaza gives you as a Liberty Station event venue
Ingram Plaza is roughly 100,000 square feet of open, park-like ground in the Arts District at Liberty Station, with an American flag at the center and trees around the perimeter. It holds up to about 3,000 people, and it sits directly across from the Dick Laub NTC Command Center with NTC Park adjacent, which means you can expand into the park if your event outgrows the plaza. It is at 2751 Dewey Road in Point Loma.
The size is the obvious selling point, but the setting is the reason to choose it over an equivalently large piece of grass somewhere else. Liberty Station is 361 acres of former Navy base, and the buildings around the plaza are Spanish Colonial Revival, white stucco with red tile roofs, put up in the 1920s and restored rather than replaced. You get an event site with real architecture around most of it, which is unusual for an outdoor venue at this scale. Most large open sites in any city are parking lots, fairgrounds, or fields, and they photograph like it.
The Navy history is why the place looks the way it does
Ingram Plaza is not a plaza somebody designed for weddings. The Naval Training Center San Diego was commissioned in 1923 and ran for seventy-four years, holding its closing ceremony in March of 1997. Hundreds of thousands of recruits passed through, and this lawn is where they stood in formation.
Since 2002 the site has been redeveloped into a mixed-use district with more than fifty renovated buildings and 300-plus businesses in them, including a nonprofit promenade, galleries, restaurants, schools, and the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Performing Arts Theater, which opened in 2025. The two-thirds-scale training frigate the USS Recruit is still standing. Stone Brewing is in the old mess hall.
All of that changes what your event feels like to an out-of-town attendee. Booking a hotel ballroom means your guests could be in any city in the country, while booking Ingram Plaza means they spend an afternoon somewhere unmistakably San Diego with a story attached, and they will bring that up later when they are deciding whether to come back next year.
What Heritage Fire is, and what a live-fire event asks of a venue
Heritage Fire is a touring live-fire food event that lands in a different city every few weeks through the summer, built entirely around cooking over wood, charcoal, and embers, with an emphasis on responsibly sourced ingredients and whole-animal cooking. The San Diego stop ran on a Sunday afternoon from three thirty to seven, with all-inclusive tickets covering unlimited tastings, spirits, wine, and beer, and a vote at the end where attendees crown one dish the city’s Heritage Hero.
The chefs cooking in San Diego included, but were not limited to. Brian Redzikowski of my favorite SD restaurant, Kettner Exchange, Chris Hutten of STK, Ethan Yang of Glass Box, Bryan Garcia of The Cork & Craft, and Alex Carballo of Grand Restaurant Group. The format puts them out in the open at their own fires rather than hidden in a kitchen, which is the entire appeal for an attendee and a genuine gift to a photographer. You get to watch people who are very good at something do it in front of you for four hours.
It also tells you something about what Ingram Plaza can handle: an event with over a dozen open fires, propane, charcoal and wood fire, lots of meat, and 21-plus alcohol service in an outdoor space needs room to separate the cooking from the crowd, vehicle access to get equipment in, and a surface that can take it. The plaza absorbed all of that without feeling crowded, which is a real answer to a question planners ask about outdoor sites and rarely get answered honestly.
What to know before you book Ingram Plaza
The venue is booked through Snake Oil Venue Company rather than through Liberty Station directly, which surprises people who go looking on the Liberty Station website and find a listing but not a rental form, so start your inquiry there.
It is fully outdoors with no built structure, so everything is a rental and everything is weather-dependent. San Diego makes that a smaller gamble than most cities, but a June or July afternoon on that plaza is warm and exposed, and shade is something you provide rather than something the site provides. If your event runs in the middle of the afternoon, tenting and water are worth more to your guests than another activation.
Parking is available in nearby lots, and it is roughly ten minutes from San Diego International Airport, which is genuinely useful for an event drawing an out-of-town crowd. It is also walking distance to a district full of restaurants and galleries, so attendees who arrive early or stay late have somewhere to go, which is not true of most large outdoor venues.
One more thing worth weighing is that the plaza sits inside a public, active district, which means your event is visible to people who did not buy a ticket. For a consumer festival, that amounts to free marketing, and for a private corporate event where you would rather not have an audience, it is something to plan around.
Same-day images from an outdoor event
I deliver same-day highlights, typically 30 to 100 fully edited images, with the full gallery following within three business days. That holds for a festival on a lawn the same as it does for a conference in a ballroom.
For an event like Heritage Fire the same-day piece does real work, because a touring event’s next stop is usually two or three weeks out and the sales window for it is open right now. Images from San Diego posted while people are still talking about San Diego sell tickets in Asheville. Waiting three weeks for a gallery means the marketing value of that afternoon expires before the photographs arrive.
The same logic applies to a corporate event, just on a longer clock. Your attendees are most engaged with your event on the day they attend it, and that is the day the images should exist.
Planning an event at Liberty Station?
If you are bringing a festival, tasting, brand activation, or corporate gathering to Ingram Plaza or anywhere else in Liberty Station, you want a San Diego event photographer who has already worked the site, moves well in a walk-around format, and gets you finished images while the event still matters.
Contact me to talk through your San Diego event, and take a look at my events and conferences portfolio while you are here. If you want to see how I work a much larger outdoor event in this city, my notes from four days at Gator by the Bay cover it.
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