Anyone working in high volume, product-driven photography knows that change comes slowly to the studio process. Even the transition from film to digital capture took some time, and that one was kind of a no-brainer, in retrospect.
Yet 20 years after the digital revolution, many studios still work from printed Shot Lists and struggle to find Samples. When it comes to the on-Set process, even less has changed. Sets are constructed from sawhorses, rolls of seamless, and brackets. The same strobe packs and heads we’ve shot with for a decade are paired with ancient c-stands. Cameras are tethered to a Mac running Capture One, and the dog-eared gray card is held aloft like a talisman warding off evil spirits. We might as well be shooting in 2002. But hey, it works, and we all know if it ain’t broke in production… we generally don’t “fix” it.
But times have changed. Visual content volume, channels, and types (e.g. video) have grown, while time-to-market has shrunk (along with resources and budgets). The past five years have seen the emergence of some exciting advances in specialized capture hardware to accelerate throughput and reduce manual labor for high volume studios.
We’ve always had a vision that ShotFlow would become the “operating system” for the world’s leading visual content studios, and like a traditional computer operating system, there would be built-in “drivers” for the most popular “peripherals” our clients utilized in their workflow. We started with a Capture One Pro “driver” five years ago, and now we are making that larger vision a reality with two new integrations going live in 2021:
ORBITVU – Automated product photography solutions
Software controlled compact studios for still, 360° product photography and video
LOOKLET – Automated on-model fashion imagery for retail
Enabling fashion retailers to create high quality automated on-model imagery at scale
Both of these integrations will be demonstrated at ShotFlow Summit 2021, so be sure to register if you haven’t already for a sneak preview of these integrations!