Brian Lloyd Duckett Get back to the subject
Street specialist Brian Lloyd Duckett says trust your camera to make a great JPEG image and enjoy a purer connection to the subject…
For me, the main considerations in street photography relate to speed. Firstly, as social media is so important to my business, I often need to get images out there fast. JPEGs lend themselves to a fast workflow – from camera to iPad to sharing.
Secondly, I don’t shoot in continuous mode very often but, when I do, I need to keep shooting and I don’t want to come up against a buffer because of huge raw files. And, as the processing is done-in camera, JPEGs tend to be predictable and consistent without much human intervention.
As a traditional, observational street photographer, the integrity or authenticity of the scene is important to me. In that way, JPEGs tend to be more honest and faithful to the scene I’m trying to capture. Conversely, when shooting in raw you can have too many options in post-production and there’s a temptation to do a little more to the image ‘because you can’. In those cases, every mouse click can strip away a little bit of realism. But when you don’t have to worry about changing things in post, it’s liberating and almost feels like you have a film camera in your hand.
The trade-off is, without that safety net of raw, of course you need to take care – JPEG affords fewer options to rescue an image. This is particularly true with white balance, and that can be a problem if you spend your day in changing lighting conditions. If you shoot at night, noise inevitably becomes an issue, too – so those are occasions where I would consider shooting raw instead – or possibly RAW+JPEG. That said, my intention is always to get a picture right in the camera if possible – and that’s whether I’m shooting raw or JPEG.
To that end, I’ll set JPEG to the highest quality, and ISO as low as possible – subject to a shutter speed of at least 1/200sec or faster. Beyond that, ‘set it and forget it’ has always been my mantra. Dial in aperture priority, set the ISO to auto and let the camera do the heavy lifting, leaving you to concentrate on the subjects in front of you. With maybe a little tweak to exposure compensation, your JPEGs should be more than acceptable. I’m a fan of contrasty images and my thumb is always on the
exposure compensation dial, usually boosting the contrast with some underexposure, especially in well-lit scenes.
It helps that street and documentary isn’t as demanding as many other genres in terms of absolute image quality, so I’m not too concerned about total colour accuracy or perfect white balance – I just need a sharp, well-exposed shot.
Shooting JPEG is a leap of faith for many, but cameras are now so good that the final image, in terms of exposure and IQ, will likely be as good as you need it to be. Don’t underestimate the power of the JPEG!