Richard Heathcote A new standard
Getty Images’ Richard Heathcote explains how professional sports photographers need the speed and predictability of JPEG…
Editorial coverage of sports needs to be instant. It’s extremely competitive and we have thousands of clients around the globe waiting not only for excellent imagery, but imagery that reaches them seconds after the moment has happened in real life. JPEG is the universal file format that everyone can view across a multitude of devices, it can be easily inserted into live online reports or dropped into mock-up pages for traditional print media, it’s consumed fast over many different platforms by many different people.
As an example of the speed to market and coverage that JPEG allows, we were delivering images of the Olympic 100m final winner crossing the line to our clients less than 30secs after it happened. And at the recent FIFA World Cup in Qatar, we had nine angles of a single goal on our feeds before some rivals even had one out.
To do this, we can easily switch between sending selects via a mobile network, consisting of maybe 50-100 images per match, or we can upload full shoots live on fast networks to our editors who are working on hundreds of pictures shot by many photographers all at once. As useful as it can be, this is an environment where raw can’t keep up. When you’re dealing with large quantities of images you need to be fast and efficient, and processing raw files adds time that isn’t necessarily giving you a better end product if you shoot correctly in the first place. Storage of images is expensive, too. We have vast archives of events which are added to daily. The compressed file format of JPEG is the only reason that’s possible.
Of course, this is dependent on getting exposure right in camera. The two main things to nail are exposure and colour balance. With mirrorless cameras and EVFs you see exactly what you’re getting, so it’s even easier to expose correctly and see if your white balance is right. In my experience it’s important to not do too much in-camera processing – keep the JPEG file standard and neutral. You can use Photoshop to tweak levels and contrast, and editing monitors are far superior to camera screens for accurate judgements.
It’s personal preference and very much depends on what your final end use is for your imagery. Most pictures these days are viewed electronically on screens that aren’t even approaching 4K resolution, and very rarely viewed at 100% magnification. That shouldn’t stop you from wanting to shoot the best quality file possible but shooting raw is about the ability to do lots of processing in post. If you don’t do lots of post-processing, then shooting JPEG only could save you lots of time and money.
Most of the time we use the maximum size JPEG, saved at Level 10 which is the smallest amount of compression, resulting in the largest possible file size. But this can change if a camera is going to be a high-volume remote at 20fps. There we’d drop the compression to Level 8 because the JPEGs will be half the size, helping with network speeds and server space.