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Action Sport Photography with Red Bull Photographer Corey Rich

Lesson 15 of 50

Final Client Delivery


Action Sport Photography with Red Bull Photographer Corey Rich

Lesson 15 of 50

Final Client Delivery


Lesson Info

Final Client Delivery

Let's actually take the last five minutes, and what Brett Willholm in segment three, which was Work Flow Asset Management, Final Image Delivery, did not get to touch on, was that final image delivery to your client. I'm just gonna talk about some of those ideas, and Brett will cut me off, or Bligh will, if they have something to add, or something that's valuable. I'm gonna go in reverse order, because I think there are a couple of things that are more important, that are critical. Let's actually start with what we deliver. In the ideal world, what we're actually delivering to a client is, the final retouched file. Either as a Photoshop document, as a TIF, and as a high resolution JPEG. Often times, Red Bull is not the case. Red Bull is a very savvy organization, with very talented people on the photo side of the business, but many of our clients, they are not savvy, and they are not comfortable using Photoshop, or Lightroom or any of the image management softwares. So we wanna give the...

m versions of the file, that they can work with. If their printer needs the Photoshop file, they have the Photoshop file. If they need the Raw file, they have the Raw file. If they need the high resolution JPEG, we've given them a high resolution JPEG. We always give a very 'relatively low res' preview image, a thousand pixels, versus the high res files, so that it's something they can move around via email, very efficiently within the office, or within the art department. Sort of 'FPO', for placement only, that's really important. Email in general, has a 10 megabyte limit. Quickly you realize, I cannot deliver files, by just emailing them to my client or to my athletes. And that's a really good point, sometimes your client is your athlete. You're out there with your friends, you're shooting pictures, you want them to be happy and make them feel like it was worth their while, and so the way we deliver those files, it's that low resolution JPEG, the preview image, you can shoot that over via email to your athlete. But with the 10 megabyte limit, if we're delivering individual files, or large batches of files, Dropbox or WeTransfer, or larger organizations have their own FTP sites that they prefer you to use if it's confidential information, or images that are very sensitive. But there's amazing tools out there today. It's just gotten easier and easier, year by year, the clients and the tools for transferring large amounts of data over the internet. Be realistic about your internet connection. If you were trying to transmit from Katmandu a large set of images, or from the middle of the Sahara desert, no matter how good your tool is, if your internet is awful, just plan on that. So JPEG compression is valuable in those worlds. Dropbox, WeTransfer, usually we use a two Gig limit. Two Gig's even on a pretty fast pipe, for upload takes some time. As soon as we cross that two Gig threshold, then we start looking at shipping drives. Whether that's shipping thumb drives, shipping actual hard drives, the sky's the limit. You can ship as much data as you desire, when you start putting them on drives. There are some real limits when you start dealing with online file transfer protocols. We find that over two Gigabytes, just things start failing, and breaking and connections drop, and some of these companies have physical limits, they'll cut you off. Brett alluded to it, we use PhotoShelter. They're both our web host and the engine behind our website, but it's also our select archive is online. The beauty of PhotoShelter is it's always on, the images are always accessible, and it's automated search and delivery. This is great if you're a one man band or a small office. Sometimes we're half way around the world, we're all busy, we're shooting in Lebanon, and a client needs something now. It's a Sunday afternoon, no ones in the office, we can't get anyone to go to the office, but we can from Lebanon, log on, and actually give them access to that PhotoShelter account, or download links so they can pull down the final image in different sizes. One other thing that I think is really important, and there's legal documents that you can use, but you can also put it in the metadata, and in the body of your email. It's being really clear what you're delivering, and why you're delivering it in the formats, that you're delivering it in. With athletes, this is a great example. I want the athletes that I photograph to get the pictures. They are 50%, if not more, of that process, of making cool pictures, but I set the expectations, for what I'm giving those images for, and what they're allowed to do with those pictures. If I'm expecting to get credit when I hand those photos out or distribute those images. I'm not a watermark guy, it's just I'm not a fan of using watermarks, but I do embed metadata. Let's see, what else, any questions? I'm getting the countdown, that we're truly running out of time, but this is our chance to touch on- On that note, do you ever put a disclosure that people can't put filters, or change the integrity of the image you're sending out? If it's to an athlete or a friend? I'm not that much of an artist I guess. At the end of the day I don't want people to go and manipulate my pictures, and truthfully, it almost never happens. Unless it's the client, and at the end of the day, hey, they paid- You're a service provider for them. Yeah exactly, they paid for the shoot. I can put my ego aside. Whatever makes them happy, makes me happy. Brett, any other thoughts? [Audience Member 2] I have a storage question for you guys, so you have a fairly big office. You probably can afford to have lots of storage. For the people who can't, when they've finished a shoot, what would you suggest for them to keep? When you've got those variations of photo files and stuff, like JPEGs, TIFs, DNGs, RAWs. Do you think it's okay for those people, to just keep the RAWs on file only, or what do you suggest? I would start at the highest level. I would say if you can afford to do it, do not throw away images. So keep all of the RAW files from every shoot, you ever do for the rest of your life, that's my advice. Hard drive space is getting very affordable. That's number one, when you get into the select world, which is you're manipulating those hero images, because that's 1% of the pictures that you shoot, probably less than 1%, you're actually going and doing real heavy lifting post processing. In those cases my recommendation, is obviously keep the RAW file. Definitely keep the Photoshop file, where you have all of these layered elements, If you wanna go and manipulate it later. And I think for ease, keep some kind of a JPEG. If we have the RAW file, we don't keep batches of TIFs, and JPEGs, we don't need that, we can always regenerate that data. So my advice is, whatever it takes keep those RAW files, because one day you might actually need them.

Class Description



Join us for this live class, and you will learn:




  1. Class Introduction
  2. What Makes A Great Action Photo
  3. Conceptualize the Shoot
  4. Research Location / Wardrobe / Props for Action Shoot
  5. Safety Tips for Action Photographers
  6. What Gear Do I Need? Packing and Prep
  7. Workflow and Asset Management
  8. Ingesting and Organizing Files
  9. Editing Down Your Selects
  10. Post Processing Overview
  11. Working with Clients to Select Finals
  12. Retouching & Post Processing: Image 1
  13. Retouching & Post Processing: Image 2
  14. Retouching & Post Processing: Image 3
  15. Final Client Delivery
  16. Introduction to Snow Athletes
  17. Setting up the Shot: Using Natural Light
  18. Getting that First Action Shot: Snow Park
  19. Scouting Location for Action Shot: Snow Park
  20. Capturing Variation of Snow Park Action Shot
  21. Refining the Snow Park Action Shot
  22. Action Shot with Strobes Overview
  23. Shoot: Action Shot with Strobes
  24. How to Light Using Strobes
  25. Action Shoot: Snow Park with Strobes
  26. Refining the Snow Park Action Shoot: Using Strobes
  27. Capturing Variation with Snow Park Athletes
  28. Capturing Portraits: Snowboarder
  29. Capturing Portrait: Skier
  30. Shoot: Feature Jump Action Shot Afternoon Natural Light
  31. Introduction to Today's Shoot
  32. Building a Rapport with the Athlete: BMX Rider
  34. Getting the First Action Shot: BMX
  35. Conceptualizing the Action Shot: BMX
  36. Prepping Gear & Refining the Action Shot: BMX
  37. Action Shoot: BMX Athlete with Natural Light
  38. Setting up Remote Cameras
  39. Capturing BMX Action Shots: Remote Cameras
  40. Conceptualizing the Shot: Using Strobes in Indoor BMX Park
  41. Lighting with Strobes: Indoor BMX Park
  42. Action Shoot: BMX Athlete with Strobes
  43. Capturing Variations of BMX Athlete
  44. Shoot High Angle Action Shot: BMX Rider
  45. Directing an Athlete Portrait: Indoors
  46. Lighting a Portrait: Indoor BMX Athlete
  47. Portrait Demo: Indoors BMX Athlete
  48. Portrait Demo: Adding Atmosphere
  49. Transmitting Live from the Field
  50. Panel Q&A


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