Howto: a workflow for distributing photos for live blogging

We are firmly in the Twitter and Facebook era. Live blogging and tweeting has been with us for 2-3 years and it’s now an expected method for broadcasting a live event if it’s not shown live on TV. The challenge for photographers is how to provide images to live tweeters and bloggers in a timely manner to match their commentary. Traditionally, at a football match a photographer shooting for an image agency would typically shoot images to a memory card and import those images into a laptop they would have beside them, and add the captions to a few photos and upload them at half-time and again at the end of the match. Sometimes, it may be more frequent, but the action will have taken place 10-30 minutes before the images are available for the agency’s client to download. Working with the guys at a new soccer web site MFootball, here is my workflow for getting photos to the blogging team at MFootball in under a minute of the peak action taking place:

My Nikon D4 is “tethered” to a Macbook Pro running the Adobe Lightroom program. This allows me to connect the camera directly to the Lightroom application and all the images from the D4 is sent directly to the laptop’s disk and shows up in the Lightroom application. Elapsed time: 3-7 seconds from pressing the shutter.
Next, I check the burst of photos and select an image. If needed, a quick crop and then export to a special folder on the Mac. Elapsed time: 10-30 secs.
The special folder is synced to the Dropbox service. Any photos saved in that folder is automatically sent to the Internet. My Mac is connected to the Internet via my iPhone using the Personal Hotspot function. Since it’s a shiny new iPhone 5 it’s data connection is LTE with an upload speed of 5-30Mbps. The exported photo is sized to 600px and is around 150kB so it’s up on the Dropbox cloud in 1-5 seconds. Elapsed time 15-40 seconds.
My MFootball blogger will see the file on their laptop’s Dropbox folder within 10-20 seconds, ready for adding a description and then sending out on Twitter. Elapsed time to Twitter – around 60 seconds.

That’s all there is to it. My aim is to have a fresh image available every 2-3 minutes. So keep an eye out on Twitter for live photos during the coming soccer season here: @melbfootball.
Here’s an example of a preseason match where Perth Glory FC used the live photos for their tweets and then posted as an album in their Facebook fan page: