The story behind captivento — and why this app exists at all.
More than ten years ago I stood at the Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig with my camera for the first time. It was overwhelming — and at some point the first model asked whether I could send her the photo. Of course I said yes, pulled out my camera and took a picture of a handwritten email address on a slip of paper. That's where it all began.
Some of those addresses were legible, others weren't. Some emails arrived, others probably ended up in some spam folder or with complete strangers. It was a lot of work — and honestly very error-prone.
At the next festival I brought business cards. On each one I wrote the number of the photo I had just taken, together with a QR code linking to a small web form. Models could then reach out later to ask for their picture. The response rate was okay, but messages came in random order — and many never came at all.
The next step was a web form I filled in together with the model right after the shoot. That was a real leap forward: no more illegible notes, no more lost addresses.
But one problem remained: I was always asking for permission afterwards — whether I could publish the photo non-commercially. My measured permission rate was around 30 % of all photos taken. At most 2 % of models actively said no — the rest simply never answered. My values matter to me, though: I only publish photos with active consent. So a lot of my favourite shots stayed in the archive.
At WGT 2024 I extended the web form with a digital signature. If a model agreed to a non-commercial publication from the start, I could now document that consent cleanly, right on the spot. Only with this step did it become possible to actually show a meaningful share of my favourite photos in my gallery.
Over the last two years I had a lot of time to think about how this process could be improved further. The result is this app: captivento — an attempt to pour all my experience, mishaps and lessons learned into a workflow that is, at least for me, just right.
I'm particularly proud of the offline capability. At large festivals I've been stuck without internet too many times, because tens of thousands of people were hanging off the same cell tower. captivento keeps working offline — data syncs cleanly once a network is back.
A lot has happened since then. I've received very positive feedback from many sides — and out of it grew plenty of new features: organising group events with several photographers and models, for example, or photographer-internal ratings and comments that let a team work on a selection together.
Where things go from here, the story will tell. Maybe more photographers will like the idea and find this workflow useful, maybe entirely new ideas will grow out of it — I'm open to all of it. Feedback, wishes and suggestions are always welcome, and I'm truly curious to see where captivento goes next.