Since 1985, Ron Vesely has been photographing some of the biggest moments in sports – including 25 World Series, 11 Super Bowls and even Michael Jordan’s short stint on the mound.
Throughout his long-lasting career, the legendary sports photographer and Chicago White Sox team photographer has produced work for an impressive array of clients, such as MLB, NFL, Sport Magazine, Inside Sports, Sporting News and many more.
Along the way, a lot has changed in terms of photo gear, accessibility and the speed of his workflow. Ron joined us for 20/21 Vision: The Workflow Summit to share the stories behind some of his greatest photos and to walk us through his evolving creative process.
In this on-demand summit session, Ron shares how he and his team are reimagining in-person experiences using digital content to build a sense of community and connection. Plus, you’ll learn how this major league team optimized our collaboration tool Workspaces to get images approved and posted in real time.
“I say this often and it’s true: I may call sports photography my job, but I never call it work.” – Ron Vesely
Transforming Ron’s Workflow
Back in the analog days of film and filing cabinets, Ron’s original photo processing and publishing workflow lasted over 10 days:
“When I got started, my workflow was pretty simple. In the film days, I shot my photos on film. I’d send them either to the processor or to the client and wait two days to perhaps a week to even see the results of my work. They’d finally come back from the lab— I’d edit them with a loop and a lightbox to pick my selects. The metadata of the day then was what you wrote on your slide.”
Today, Ron’s workflow benefits from modern-day tech and PhotoShelter helps streamline team success:
“Today, as we all know, everything is about the moment, and with regard to my workflow shooting baseball for the White Sox, on the graphic you’ll see two workflow paths: the red is the in-game, in-the-moment needs and the green shows needs after the game.” — Ron Vesely
With our recently released collaboration tool, Workspaces, Ron and his team can share visual assets, discuss ongoing projects and campaigns, review and approve photos and more, all while each team member works remotely – without ever having to leave their PhotoShelter library.
“Workspaces has quickly become a go-to option for us. What I’ve done is I’ve created on the back end individual Workspaces tailored for the different departments: PR, CR, Social, etc. and what I’m able to do then is invite specific department users to their Workspace while at the same time separating the projects by applying custom filters. It makes it super easy for us to collaborate without sending emails saying ‘What do you think?’ or ‘Hey Ron, we want image XYZ, can you pull this?”
It’s opened up a time-efficient and an effective means to collaborate; no more back and forth emails. The approval process is really easy because you can mark it as approved and add comments and we can go back and forth very quickly to get things done. As the leader behind the scenes, I can make sure project assets are then directed where once approved if they need to go outside the organization… It’s been fun and the response has been very very positive.”
For this virtual summit, we partnered with Voice in Shape, a creative agency whose mission is to “enhance brand communications through the power of visual storytelling and design.” As each of our summit speakers told their stories, Karina from Voice in Shape illustrated key takeaways. We loved adding this fun, interactive element to our event.
Check out the final illustration from Ron’s session below!
Want to hear from more industry leaders and inspire your team’s creative workflow? Watch the on-demand sessions from 20/21 Vision: The Workflow Summit, and set up a one on one workflow consultation with our team here.
