Hey Sports Shooters!!

If I have the extra HD space....should I be shooting RAW? Do any of you shoot RAW for your kid's soccer pics? When the sun comes out here in the NW it is bright! I would love to be able to better manipulate in post with RAW. Any thoughts?

I'm not a pro so my 2cents worth prolly doesn't mean much. BUT, after shooting 957 pics at a high school volleyball match (JV and Varsity), I surely don't want to deal with going thru all of them. The poor computer would prolly throw up!

I'll most likely shoot upwards of 4000 tomorrow at a tournament. UGH!
Mike

Not only do I strictly shoot in jpeg, I don't even use the highest quality setting. It may help when shooting at ultra high iso's, or when significantly underexposing shots, but I find most situations just don't need it.

I shoot nothing but raw. They are converted to tiff's when they hit my computer and the raw file is deleted. So don't have to worry about raw files taking up too much HD space.

Of course I don't shotgun away till you hit the buffer like most people these days. We're talking 200, maybe 300 in a football game.

I shoot RAW period. If there is a need to shoot JPEG's (Client wants shots on-site or they are needed for instant proofing) I will shoot RAW + JPEG Lrg Fine.

MT Stringer wrote in post #8490841
I'll most likely shoot upwards of 4000 tomorrow at a tournament.

I shoot RAW exclusively as I want the most flexibility possible when post-processing.

You can weed out the junk fairly quickly in Adobe LightRoom..

4,000 pictures in RAW mode is going to be a bit of a pain.. Assuming your images are 20 megs on average you'll need (5) 16gb CF cards to shoot that tournament.

SanDisc does make a 32gb CF card, however it's a 30 MB/s card instead of a 45 MB/s (it's slower!).

Are you paid for each picture taken? 4,000 sounds like an incredibly large number for an afternoon of shooting..

Pardon my noobness if that is the norm (1,000 in a day and my shoulders and wrists will be exhausted).

I don't do the rapid fire like I used to. Maybe 200 shots at a soccer game...less if it's an exciting game (I get caught up in the action). Thanks for the input folks!

I'm shooting boxing, which can easily yield 600 on a small card, to over 2000 on a "big" event. I also time my shots and rarely shoot more than 2 consecutive shots, and even then the odd 2nd shot is usually an accident.

I almost never carry more than 4 gigs worth of card with me, and rarely need more than 2 of those gigs.

I shoot raw exclusively for the flexibility in post-processing. I had an issue the other night at a soccer game where my white balance was way off during a time period during the match. I got to thinking about it and it was most likely due to the fact that the field lights were turned on at the start of the game while it was still fairly light outside. As the sun was doing down and it was starting to get darker, I had areas on the field where the mix of natural and artificial light threw off my auto white balance and I ended up with quite a few pictures that were very blue. It was no problem at all to fix these in Lightroom since I had raw images to work with; I shudder to think how many good shots I would have lost if I had been shooting jpeg.

I shoot JPGs now for most sports. You can open JPGs in camera raw to adjust white balances, etc so it's a huge time & space saver since there are probably only a couple images I want to do that to.

All of your regular adjustments are there.. Also works in Lightroom 2.

When shooting sports outdoors, we all know the sun can be brutal at times, Shooting Raw will give you that ability to scale back the whites when you won't be able to do that if you shoot Jpeg.

Sure you can- it's called Shadow/Highlight <Alt+I+A+W>.

I only shot JPG in the past. At my new job they shot all in RAW and use Lightroom to edit. It is super fast and I really dont see the difference to editing out junk that I did with JPG. It does give lots of freedom to fix shots that would in the past be thrown out. I now will have to rethink my thought process as I see no problem shooting in RAW.

BTW at new job they use Nikon D3 with ScanDisk Extreme IV 4 gig cards. At times I have shot at 9fps with no problem to catch the proper moment.

jfisanick wrote in post #8492740
When shooting sports outdoors, we all know the sun can be brutal at times, Shooting Raw will give you that ability to scale back the whites when you won't be able to do that if you shoot Jpeg.

SnapLocally.com wrote in post #8492777
Sure you can- it's called Shadow/Highlight <Alt+I+A+W>.

Sure you can... But using that adjustment on an 8bit jpg looks pretty ****ty when compared to making the adjustment on a raw file or a tiff. What you can do with a jpg is nowhere even close to what you can do with a raw file.

Both of them have their pros and cons. I used to exclusively shoot jpg and thought raw was just a waste of time. Of course, that was when I thought you had to open up each raw file individually in photoshop, make the adjustments, export it, save it, and move on to the next one.

Then, I was shown the light by a guy I worked with and I learned about streamlining workflow and started to use lightroom.

For me, I just dont understand why I should shoot jpg if Im going home to work on the pictures anyways. Obviously, if Im having to transmit on site, Ill shoot jpg, but otherwise I just dont see why I should stray from shooting raw.

Ultimately, its up to you.

shoot both, raw+jpg

if it needs work, work on the raw, if not, use the jpg.