What to Do With Your Music Festival Photos

Concert Photography  •  Photography Tips

Well, if you have survived a music festival in one piece, and all your gear is intact, that’s a big achievement in itself. But you can’t put your feet up and take the next few days off. There’s a lot of work to do and very little time to do it. Post-processing is a heavy chore, but more than that, you have to make sure that you leverage the most out of your images, before another photographer beats you to it:

When shooting at a music festival (and for that matter any festival), there are bound to be similar looking images from many different photographers. If they beat you to it, their images will see the light of day before yours do. The following tips from event photographer Ruth Medjber will help you get your images edited and published faster to swing the advantage in your favor.

Lightroom is one of the best tools for quickly and efficiently completing your editing, and for outputting screen resolution JPEGs quickly for sharing on social media. But Medjber recommends also outputting the high resolution images for sharing with your clients and for printing.

Images meant for the press don’t need too much post-processing. Just a bit of cropping and exposure adjustment. That’s all.

Image Information

Make sure to embed all the necessary data into your images before you release them. Include your name, your copyright information, and contact details. In case anyone gets hold of your images and wants to use them, they will know how to get in touch.

Captioning

Captioning is important. As important as entering the right keywords. Let’s say that you take this great image of a couple of friends. The newspapers, if they want to run this image, will want to know the names of the people on the photo, their age(s), and where they’re from. Newspapers won’t run an image without this basic information.

Write down the captions as you go along shooting. Then, when you’re back in your office, you can transcribe the information into the IPTC section of the images.

Watermarking

Watermarking is necessary when you’re releasing your photos online. Use it in an unobtrusive way so that your name or website URL is visible but doesn’t upset the whole image. It’s a great way to advertise and a way to prevent image theft.

Editing Time

If you shot Friday to Sunday, take Monday off so that you can post process all your images. There isn’t a moment to lose after you arrive home. It’s all about the speed of delivery that gets you ahead of the competition.

Tagging

If you’re sharing your images on social media, tag the band, advertisers, sponsors, and anyone you think can share the images and get your name around.

Getting your images seen might be the most challenging part of music festival photography. Follow these tips to get your work noticed.