Before I ask you to imagine a scene, I’d like to point out that (for the avoidance of any doubt) this has never actually happened. There’s a big group of clients and potential clients staging a demo with placards and a megaphone with the chant

“What do we want?”

“Great pictures!”

“When do we want them?”

“As fast as the technology will allow!”

News and sports photographers are all very well versed in supplying pictures really quickly. These days that mostly means transmitting directly from the camera or, as a fall back, moving images via their smartphone or tablet or even sticking cards into a laptop every few minutes during the event to upload from there. I’ve talked a lot about FTP from the camera and have even made a couple of tutorial videos about exactly how to do it with the various Canon cameras that I’ve used. Obviously the concept is exactly the same with Sony and Nikon as well as some of the latest Fujifilm bodies.

For me, as someone who shoots a lot of PR and corporate work, live pictures have become part of my professional offering. From working with Eye-Fi cards in Canon EOS 5D MkIIIs back in 2013 right up to the Canon EOS R6 MkIIs that I currently use for most of my work it has always been about getting images to the client and their social media teams as fast as possible. I want them to use my pictures rather than relying on their own mobile phone images. That’s a plus for two reasons: the first is that they are using my images which will be better quality and secondly, the chances of a member of the social media team standing in front of me or other invited media whilst we are shooting is greatly decreased.

In my biography on several websites I mention being flexible in the way I shoot and deliver images and that I need to keep up with technology to make sure that everything is as fast and painless as possible whilst maintaining the highest levels of quality. It can sometimes mean compromises but those are the conversations that you have with clients when agreeing a brief (and a price).

The main platform that I use is Photoshelter. It’s not perfect and it’s not cheap but clients really appreciate having access to images quickly. So much so that a couple of them have asked me to help them establish their own Photoshelter accounts and I transmit live images directly to them. Others have their own areas on my Photoshelter site. As I said, flexible.

Having the ability to upload images from the camera using FTP to a pre-shared gallery has become something that many of them expect and even depend on. Sometimes those galleries are password protected and sometimes they aren’t. It depends on what the client wants and needs and Photoshelter gives me loads of options to set up the galleries in pretty much exactly the right way. Uploading images direct from the camera means that the IPTC captions are either missing or (with my Canons) limited to pre-loaded generic ones but most of the time the social media teams know what they are looking at and can identify the people, places and events and are happy to sacrifice captions for speed.

Flexibility means that, if the budget allows it, an editor can be employed to handle the images and crop, tone and caption them really quickly. Because the editor can access the Photoshelter galleries you have the choice of not making images available to the client until that editor is happy with them. As I keep repeating, flexible.

This kind of technology is far from new. I have been using Photoshelter for almost nine years now and uploading live images to it for nearly as long. Clients’ appetites for these super-fast photographs has continued to grow. Before that there were Flickr, Dropbox and even my own servers but the concept was always the same – even if the delivery has become somewhat slicker. New options are coming and I spend a lot of my spare time fine-tuning what I can offer as well as occasionally suggesting improvements to hardware and software suppliers.

Ninety-nine percent of the time I choose to go back through my memory cards later in the day and do a ‘traditional’ edit. In the relative comfort of a media room or even my own office I crop, tone and caption the selection from RAW files using my favourite applications Photo Mechanic and Adobe Camera RAW. That way the client gets their super-speedy social media and rapid access JPEGs and then gets an optimised set for slower uses.

I still find myself introducing clients to the concept of live images and that must mean one of three things:

• That their previous photographers didn’t offer the service
• That they have never seen the need for it before
• That they’ve known about it and subsequently forgotten

Whichever of those it is (and it’s almost always the first one) the vast majority of them get it, see the benefits of it and are prepared to allow for it in their budget. I love to have the conversations about how they will get their images, who can have access to them and about all of the added advantages of the live images I am offering.

Earlier this year I shot an event where there were well over a hundred different social media people who were given access to my pictures. Only half a dozen of them were actually at the event and over three quarters of them were on different continents and in different time zones. To add some perspective, about fifty percent of them used live images and the rest didn’t post until later when the edit from cards was completed.

To quote my own “about me” page:

“The way that I work has evolved as my practice has developed and my skills have improved. Of course it is still all about the pictures but the way we shoot, edit, distribute and archive jobs is constantly evolving. Having flexible workflows is now a cornerstone of what being a professional means.“