The National Spelling Bee and RAW vs JPG. (How fast is fast enough?)

It is hard to believe that with all the work I have done for newspapers that I have just covered my first spelling bee. The cool thing is that it was the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The contest itself was great. We did have some issues with the people running the show when they threw us out of the ballroom after the semifinals while most of us still had images to file. Apparently this was because ABC wanted to shoot a segment that would be shown later that night and they did not want other media in the room. Must have been a state secret although we all knew what it was and all the parents and kids could be there. Not only did we have to leave the room, we had to pack up ALL of our equipment. It was ridiculous.

Anyway, it was really amazing to watch these kids spell words that many of us had never heard of before. I told one of the men whose job it was to say the words to the kids that I could never do this. My first impulse after hearing the word, repeating it back and hearing it again would be to ask, “can you spell that please?”

I was shooting the event for ZUMA Press and since there were kids competing from all over the country, I decided that I would send photos of everyone. I did not start covering it until the semifinal round, so I only had to deal with about 50 kids, but that was still a tall order.

I figured I would use the Photo Mechanic code replacement feature to get the names into a pre-built generic caption. This was the first time I had used this feature and it worked like a charm. And since all the kids had big numbers on their chests the process was pretty easy.

So, I ingest the cards and use Photo Mechanic to rename and put in the generic caption and do the code replacement. Then load the images into Lightroom.

Some may ask why do the rename and basic caption in Photo Mechanic instead of just letting Lightroom do it during import. My reason is simply that I cannot stand the fact that Lightroom will not let you EVER alter the original RAW file. I will agree that generally, you do not want to do this, but I think the caption is the exception. Photo Mechanic lets you write the caption to the RAW file and the caption will always be with it. Lightroom writes the caption to the sidecar file and if you lose those sidecar files a year later, you lose the caption.

After loaded into Lightroom, I do the edit, and then apply basic color and exposure adjustments to the files I am sending. I do any cropping here and then export to jpg files and FTP them off to ZUMA.

Now I subtitled this post, “How fast is fast enough” because, most photographers that I see on shoots here in D.C. are shooting jpg instead of raw. They say raw is too slow. I have to disagree. I know that Getty and AP and Reuters all want images ASAP, but seriously, is an extra 2 or 3 minutes REALLY that big of a deal? I watched an AP photographer at the healthcare bill signing as he shot the first images of the President signing the bill. He pulled the card, put it in the card reader on the laptop that he had sitting next to him and the images where on the way to the picturedesk. I would bet that they showed up on CNN or some other website before the President was done signing the bill. (Only of course because he used about 10 pens.)

Is this really necessary? Are we so starved for immediate news that we have to stop shooting to send photos before the moment we are shooing is over?

I know that shooting RAW is a bit slower. But while everyone else was fiddling with white balance and tweaking this and that to send maybe 10 images, I sent 160 images within an hour of the semifinals being over. I sent 50 images after the finals and it took only 35 minutes.

Hell, I didn’t even have a firewire card reader. Don’t ask why.

Well enough about the process. Here are a few more images from the night. And in case anyone wonders, no, there was no great reaction from the winner. Just a pretty smile.

Prints of all photos from the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee can ordered from my Photoshelter archive.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 9:59 pm. It is filed under On Assignment and tagged with advice, discussion, dispatches, linkedin, people, photojournalism, photojournalist, tournaments, washington d.c.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.