WWE, the globetrotting professional wrestling company that's home to household names like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, has a stable of on-screen grapplers called Alpha Academy. But there is another faction of Alphas behind the scenes: the photography division that primarily uses Sony cameras.
"We have three staff photographers and most of them use Sony, and we have about fifteen freelancers," says WWE's VP of photography, former New York Times photo editor Brad Smith, who recently appeared on the B&H Explora Podcast.
"Obviously I would never, ever insist on what freelancers use – they can use whatever works best for them. And I'd say a good percentage of them use Sony and the rest primarily Canon and Nikon – that's the only three groups we really pull from at this point, for the people that we're using now."
As you might expect, the team uses the entire range of Alpha cameras when shooting ringside or in the pop-up studios when the organization takes over arenas for an event.
"I have an A1 and an A9 and an A7R," adds senior director of photography, Rich Frida. A 30-year WWE veteran, known as 'Starbucks' for his propensity to work up to 16 hours without rest, he and his team produced 2.6 million images last year, covering almost 170 live shows.
What really excites Frida, however, is Sony's latest professional camera – which he sees being truly transformative for WWE's bombastic brand of glitz, glamor and grappling. "They announced a new camera that for our needs was an absolute game changer. It's the A9 III, which has something called a global shutter.
"We have a lot of LEDs that work in our environments, and they have a cycling effect. And sometimes we get banding on those images when we're shooting at high shutter speeds, which we often do to capture action. And the global shutter will completely remove that as an issue moving forward."
So what other kit does the wrestling federation's photography division rely on, in the course of churning out those 2.6 million stills each year?
"Within our group we use ProGrade cards for the most part. We use nothing but ProGrade readers – that's the card readers that we use. And then… our studio set up, that's primarily fueled by Profoto equipment."
It's a massive change in technology and workflow for Frida, who began his WWE career shooting with film and on-camera flash 30 years ago. But he welcomes all the advancements.
"When I first started working at WWE, we were shooting a show and putting our rolls of film into a bag and then shipping them off to a photo lab and we'd get those images back three or five days later. Obviously it's a much different scenario now with social media and digital and all these different platforms that we're trying to feed to.
"But I've always embraced the change and embraced the new challenge of learning new stuff… The technology and the tools are constantly changing and constantly getting better. I think that for us, that's super exciting. And it gives us an opportunity to try new things and experiment with new techniques."
Check out the entire podcast to hear more on the unique advantages of the Sony A9 III, along with the company's attitudes to things like post-processing and AI. And don't forget that the company's Super Bowl-sized supershow, WrestleMania, takes place tonight and tomorrow! For more information, visit WWE.com.
You might be interested in the best cameras for sports photography from all the big brands, along with the best lenses for sports photography.
