Matty Graham Shooting right, travelling light
The light and portable OM-1 is the weapon of choice for pro Matty Graham, enabling him to open new creative doors when shooting JPEGs
As a professional photographer and filmmaker, I create a varied selection of content; my day job focuses on creating video for commercial clients, but I also shoot a lot of wildlife and travel. The latter images could be anything from personal projects to shots for use with tourism board clients, or consumer magazines.
For me shooting JPEG is a choice I make based on creativity and workflow. If I’m away on a photo assignment, I tend to use JPEGs until I return home, when I can edit my raw images if needed. I would much prefer to use the time I have on location to capture images, not edit them. If I’m keeping my social media channels up to date, it’s far easier to transfer JPEGs to my iPad and upload from there.
There are lots of technical benefits to using JPEGs if you need them too. For instance, smaller file sizes mean buffers clear faster, you can shoot for longer, and use less storage. But one of the main reasons I often use JPEGs on my OM-1 is the camera’s Art Filters. These are a great change of pace and I often use them to challenge myself, for example creating interesting images with these stylistic boundaries. The High Contrast Black and White mode works brilliantly for street scenes, so I’ll head into the city of whichever location I’m travelling through and create some JPEGs with that distinctive monotone flavour.
I think this is something people forget – with JPEG, you get the instant creative ‘hit’ of seeing a stylised image straight away, but raws always need processing and can look pretty flat out of the camera.
We all know JPEGs are less tolerant to editing than raws but really, it doesn’t take that much effort to take control of your exposure, so if this is where you are falling down then perhaps you are being a little lazy with your preparation – i.e. shooting JPEG can make you better as more precision is required at the time of shooting. And in challenging light you can always bracket exposures to ensure you get the best.
Today’s flagship cameras have such good colour science, accurate metering, and delicate processing that JPEG files look great most of the time. Remember, all images begin life as raws, so all the tonal information is there for the camera to make a superb image, it’s just more
automated than doing it yourself. If it’s a bit too high wire, set the camera to RAW+JPEG, but notice you may use the raws less.
Going back to file size, the OM-1 has a 20MP sensor so unlike many cameras the raw files are quite small in comparison. However, this changes if I’m shooting, say, landscapes using the camera’s High Resolution Shot mode, which makes multiple exposures as it moves the sensor around. These are merged into a huge 80MP file, and in that case the raws are a lot larger than doing it in JPEG format.