Brad Mangin’s Editorial Photography Workflow

Brad Mangin has more than 25,000 images (and growing) in his archive. As an editorial sports photographer, he spends a lot of time actually shooting. His specialty? Baseball, where he shoots over 100 games in a season, producing a huge amount of images.

Brad has two main clients, Sports Illustrated and Major League Baseball. His shooting approach may be the same for both, but when it comes to workflow, they are very different.

Sports Illustrated is no different than any other magazine, in that deadlines are always a consideration. In the really old days, Brad would just drop rolls of film into an envelope, drop it off at the airport (seriously!) and the people at SI would develop his film, edit his take, and meet their deadlines.

Today, however, it’s much different. After he shoots a game, he will return home and download his cards to his Macintosh Pro (tower) computer. (I am totally jealous of his massive 30 inch monitor.) He has his camera set to shoot raw + JPEG, and after the upload all of the images are all sitting on an external hard drive in a folder for that entire game.

Photo Mechanic is the next step, where he will make an initial edit, and add a generic batch caption to all the images.

Then he sends all of the JPEG images to Sports Illustrated directly via FTP. (They like to see everything.) The JPEG images are much smaller and are enough to get them started editing and planning for the next issue. He will send the raw files next – they are much larger and take longer, but since they already have the JPEG versions, there isn’t too much of a rush.

Brad will then go back and edit the shoot, removing images that may be bad, or too similar to others. Of those 100 or so images, he will add specific information to the image, identifying the players in each images, adding them to the generic caption already in place.

Once this is complete, he uploads the raw images to PhotoShelter so they can become part of his massive online archive.

Brad has regular clients, and regular editors, that he works with all the time. He makes use of PhotoShelter’s “Trusted Client” feature, where he can identify certain people who have complete access to his entire archive. They can search everything he has, and download high resolution images, any time, day or night – and even when he is busy shooting. This is a beloved feature with his editors, making Brad’s archive easily accessible – which means his images are easier to access, which means his images are used more often, which means he makes more money.

His other main client, Major League Baseball, operates differently. MLB actually has a PhotoShelter Multi User account, and Brad will transfer his fully captioned and keyworded JPEG images directly into their archive using the PhotoShelter Uploader application.

MLB is able to access the images in their archive any time, even during the weekends by editors from home, if necessary.

Because Brad is so dedicated to keeping his archive current, his archive is a wealth of baseball history, just waiting for editorial buyers. Brad’s main reason for using PhotoShelter was to take advantage of the bulletproof storage capabilities of the platform. But in the process, for no extra work on his part, he has a fully searchable archive just ready and waiting for stock image sales — directly from his own website.

His website is powered by liveBooks, into which his PhotoShelter archive has been seamlessly integrated. His branding, look-and-feel, and even site navigation are all the same, and his clients never know the difference.