Last week, fans were left on the edge of their seats as the last three contestants of “Top Photographer with Nigel Barker,” competed in a surprise photography challenge at one of New York City’s most iconic locations – the Empire State building. Contestants Jamiya, Scott and Roxy had the unbelievable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shoot the sunrise over Manhattan from a private, VIP area at the top of the landmark building, an exclusive viewing area normally closed to the public.
If there’s ever a dream moment as a photographer that you don’t want to mess up – this would be it. We all watched in horror as Roxy had an exasperating realization that she had made the ultimate rookie mistake. During her post-shoot edit session, Roxy revealed that every single image she captured that morning was in (gasp!) JPEG. Roxy’s pictures were beautiful, for sure, and even the judges agreed that her capture was not only unique, but also showed a dreamy essence of the city. So why was it such a big deal that she didn’t shoot in RAW, and why did Nigel reprimand her during the judging session, waving his finger and exclaiming “Bad photographer!”?
Every time you take a picture, there are settings applied to your image, some of the settings are set by the photographer and some are programmed by the camera -things like white balance, sharpening and tone curves. As you can imagine, when offered a unique opportunity like shooting from the Empire State Building, you want all these settings to be just right. But what happens when you shoot in JPEG is that it compresses the image so much that in order to make it a smaller file, it permanently writes these settings into your image and you can’t really change them- at least not without affecting the quality of the compressed image. So, unless you did a perfect job setting your camera to capture the subtle golds, yellows and pinks of a rapidly changing sunrise, there isn’t much you can do to correct your image. That’s a lot of pressure! That’s why to make it easier on yourself and allow more creative control over your final image, you should always shoot in RAW!
In this video by Top Photographer judge David Bergman, he explains how shooting in RAW gives the photographer a lot more control, allowing him/her to make changes in settings without any loss in quality. The RAW format actually captures all of the data from your camera sensor, uncompressed before any of the other settings are applied. With the ability to work on the photo after the fact, Roxy would have been able to manipulate things like white balance, shadows, highlights, etc. as if she had shot it that way in-camera. This gives you a lot of room for error if you make any common photography mistakes like shooting a little too light or too dark. But because she shot in JPEG, she pretty much had to be happy with what she captured as is, and hope that judges were, too!
Luckily for Roxy (and her fans), it turns out that despite shooting in JPEG, Roxy managed to capture a winning sunrise photo. With a little photography experience, a good eye (and luck) Roxy’s photo managed to win the judge’s approval based on its originality and unique perspective, and she won the challenge. (This was terrible news for Jamiya who lost the challenge and got sent home, even though his beautiful capture was a favorite of guest judge Jeremy Jauncey – and was captured in RAW.)
So now that we’ve hopefully all learned from Roxy’s mistake we will always remember to set our camera to capture RAW, right? Just remember, though, shooting in RAW is not really a reason to not have your camera settings right in the first place! Any time you can save in editing is valuable time for both you and a client. But you can at least think of shooting in RAW like shooting with insurance and an added level of confidence about not missing those once-in-a-lifetime moments.
In the meantime, we are left with two contestants on Top Photographer who will battle it out during the final photography challenge tomorrow night. Tune in and find out if it will be Scott or Roxy who comes out on top! (You can be sure that Roxy won’t forget to check her camera settings this time!)
Are you #teamRoxy or #teamScott? Join the conversation at #topphotographer or leave us a comment below.
