Long assignments and lightning-fast turnarounds: life as an agency sports photographer

Most sports action images reach the public via agencies such as Getty Images, Reuters and the European Pressphoto Agency – yet few of us know much about the photographers who shoot them. What are the good and bad aspects of agency work? Why do photographers choose it? How long do they spend away from home, and how much creative freedom are they given?

Richard Heathcote, a senior sports photographer for Getty Images, is one of the most experienced agency photographers working today. He has been a professional photographer for 25 years and has covered countless sporting events, including all the best-known international football, rugby and general sports tournaments. He was the 2019 Sports Journalist Association Photographer of the Year and the overall winner in the 2020 World Sports Photography Awards.

Here, Richard shares his insights into life as an agency photographer, talks about his workflow when covering major sports events and reveals how Canon's EOS R System has had an impact on his work.

Richard left college in 1996 and freelanced for about a year before joining Action Images as a staff photographer. He moved to Getty Images in 2004, and has been there ever since. "I like the way agencies work," he explains. "There are more opportunities – in general there's only one sports photographer per newspaper, whereas we must have around 25-30 staff sports photographers just in the UK, plus all the freelancers. If you're working for a newspaper, you might get into more of the high-profile events, but agency photographers travel a lot more and cover a greater variety of sports."

The agency uses what Richard describes as a 'tag and send' workflow, in which all the events it covers are live-edited by the editing team. "At a football match, I might shoot around 1,000 pictures," he explains. "I might upload around 150 to our editors for them to decide which ones they want to use, keep or discard. From that 150, maybe 75 get to the site or are published.

"When I'm shooting pictures, I'll voice-caption them, tag, and send them. I use the camera's Voice Memo feature to record caption information to the file, and then the File Lock function to 'mark' that file. In the image transfer options I select 'Locked files not transmitted' and then upload them to my chosen FTP destination. This saves time, as I don't have to scroll through the images on the LCD screen frame by frame and send them individually.

"Our editing software runs on a cloud server, and all the editors connect to it while on a Zoom call at the same time. The pictures come in to the editors, they pick what they want, do a quick edit, then caption them and upload them to our site. We can upload pictures extremely quickly if we need to – from the moment it lands from my camera into the FTP, it can be sent to our clients in under 40 seconds."

"In theory, an external Wireless File Transmitter (WFT) would have a better signal, but the internal antenna on the Canon EOS R3 seems to be extremely good," says Richard. "Also, because 5GHz Wi-Fi is built into the body, it makes life easier. Occasionally, there's a big jump in camera technology, but most of the time it's the smaller innovations in new models that actually make the biggest difference."

Richard has been shooting with the Canon EOS R5 since it first became available. "It's just a fantastic camera," he says. "You can use it at some sports and not others because of the risk of rolling shutter, but you kind of pick your subjects. I've used it alongside my Canon EOS-1D X Mark III bodies, which are my current workhorses."

Rolling shutter is a common phenomenon when cameras use an electronic shutter – the camera reads data down the imaging sensor line by line and, in the time it takes to do that, very fast moving objects might have changed position. The result can be objects such as moving golf clubs looking stretched or warped. To prevent this, many photographers prefer to use mechanical shutter (which typically means a slightly slower frame rate) – but the high-speed sensor in the Canon EOS R3 minimises rolling shutter distortion, as motorsports photographer Vladimir Rys discovered while shooting an electric rally car.

"I'd definitely say the Canon EOS R System has diversified my output," Richard continues. "The silent shutter and improved frame rates allow you to do things you couldn't do before. For example, while at events where there have been no spectators because of Covid-19, everyone can hear an EOS-1D X Mark III firing away at 16fps. Whereas if you're shooting on an EOS R System body, nobody can hear it. It doesn't distract the athletes, and you can take pictures you'd have thought twice about taking previously."

The Canon EOS R3 has been designed specifically to meet the needs of sports and news photographers and Richard is impressed with what he's seen so far. "It's slightly smaller than the EOS-1D X Mark III and, although it's also lighter, it feels like a familiar and comfortable tool to use in the hand, which means you adapt more quickly to using it," he explains. "The last thing you want is to go to a job with something that's completely different, because you're thinking more about what you're doing with the camera than the subject in front of you.

"The EVF on the EOS R3 is absolutely fantastic and comfortably the best I've seen on any mirrorless camera. It has the Eye Control AF built-in, and that's possibly one of the reasons why the viewfinder is so large, but as a consequence, it makes it really nice to use. The 30fps frame rate is also great – if I'm shooting a swing sequence in golf or tennis, for example, I've simply got more frames to choose from."

Richard recently used the EOS R3 at a major golf tournament for the first time and says, "It came into its own as a dependable, mirrorless version of the EOS-1D X Mark III." He found the workflow with the two cameras is almost identical, but the R3's features, including the silent shooting facility, EVF and high ISO performance, brought new benefits that helped him in his work.

"I could shoot whenever I wanted, without fear of putting the players off, and I could let the AF points do their thing and keep track of faces/eyes, which allowed me to concentrate on where the subject was in the frame and if they made any sudden movements," he continues. "I could also make sure the exposure was perfect, especially with silhouettes, and being able to move up to extremely fast shutter speeds meant I could keep a shallower depth of field to make the subject pop."

Richard thinks he'll definitely be a regular Canon EOS R3 user but expects the transition to be gradual. "If I'm at a football match, for example, I know I have to get the goal picture and the celebration," he explains. "You have to trust your equipment implicitly, and the only way you do that is by using it and realising how it can help you create things quicker, easier and better.

"The latest Canon cameras are fantastic, and the jumps in AF, image quality and lens quality are amazing. I think that over the coming months, people in my profession will gradually transition to using the EOS R3 and RF glass. In my work, I'm always trying to look for something a bit different. Yes, there are a lot of traditional angles you always want to cover, but you also want to try to find something new. The EOS R3 will help me do that."