My Concert Workflow
Being in such a fast-paced industry, I found bands like having something to post online as soon as possible, which means you as a photographer need to work extra fast and efficiently to get your band the content they deserve.
Long story short, I’m constantly working. Whether I’m in the photo pit waiting on the next band to start, behind the merch table, in the van, or behind the counter at my day job, I’m working on a photo set to get out content asap. And now I’m going to tell you how I manage to pull it off.
Assuming I’m on tour and only have to shoot the one set, my workflow is fairly easy. At least it’s easier than the nights I’m working for a publication and have 3 sets to work on that night.
Once I’m done with the set, photos come off of my camera and straight to my external hard drive. This is where I keep all of my files organized so I don’t have to worry about them getting jumbled up somewhere on my computer. Even more recently, I’ve gotten a new laptop with much less storage than my old one, which is fine because it’s only supposed to have the essentials anyway, right?
Everything on my external hard drive is separated by Tour>Date>RAW or Edits>Band>Photo or Video. All of my RAW files stay together in that Date section, but Edits is where the filing gets interesting. Sometimes I shoot multiple bands in one night, so this is where I’ll make that distinction. Then following that same theme, whatever edited video I have for that band goes in its respective folder.
My Lightroom catalog really needs to get cleaned up, now that I think about it. It’s been a while since I’ve actually put things where they belong. I’ve had so many personal projects. Normally, it looks something similar to my external hard drive, with a small difference: Year>Tour>Date>Band or Year>Date>Band for a one-off show.
Once my photos are on my computer, Lightroom, and in the right place, now comes the editing. If I’m lucky, I’ll have wifi, and first thing’s first is to sync Lightroom to Lightroom Mobile. Once that’s done, I can edit from my phone if we happen to go out to get food or if my laptop dies. All of my presets are on my phone as well as my computer, so wherever I am, I can do the same work. I tend to start editing on one platform and finishing on another, usually laptop to phone, since it’s easier to just send out edits from a phone.
I used to save all full resolution photos from the night to my computer or hard drive in a separate folder, which I would then move to Dropbox, but I slowly realized this was just a waste of digital space since most bands I worked with just wanted the lower resolution photos for social media. So I just keep them on Lightroom and share my synced folders with the band so they can download whatever they need. If they need a larger res file, they usually ask me for it.
Now if I happen to be working a festival or a show where I’m working too much to be able to take out a laptop, but I’d still like to be on top of social media, I tend to take advantage of my camera’s ability to send photos to my phone via bluetooth. The only downside? It sends over JPEGs, so I can’t do very extensive edits like I’d do for RAWs, and the two edits tend to look incredibly different from one another. This is a bummer, but I try my best to keep them looking as similar as possible.
But that’s about it, the basics of how I get my photos out so quickly. Does anyone out there have any methods that I’ve never tried?
