Took my own advice

Sam

Yesterday I volunteered to take a few portraits of a friend’s mom. She is 87 and doesn’t have the ability to walk too far so locations were limited. I actually followed my own advice today. I have several friends who were thinking about trying RAW and I advised them to take both RAW and large jpg (camera permitting). This would give them their normal jpg file, and the RAW to practice play with.

Once I learned how to shoot, process RAW files with my 300D, I never shot jpg again, but kept reading how wedding, and event photographers would shoot jpg to decrease the post process time. I found with my Rebel the image quality of RAW far out performed jpg, (probably operator error) so didn’t have an incentive to use jpg.

Now I have the 5D and can shoot both at the same time, I finally gave it a whirl. WOW was I blown away. I set the picture style to portrait, and the images were great right out of the camera! Shooting both did provide an advantage when the photo they liked best was under exposed, (too large a dynamic range) and needed help. RAW to the rescue. (I don’t like the photo, but that’s not important. The important part is, they like it!)

I cropped it 8X10 so it would be easy for them to find an off the shelf frame. Then I remembered I had an older wooded frame with an 8X10 matt. I put it all together and gave it to her mom, and you would have thought I gave her a bag of gold.

Last week I photographed the neighbor’s granddaughter’s first birthday party. Had I shoot jpg it would have speeded up the post process substantially.

Old dogs can learn new tricks, even if it’s to follow one’s own advice.

Sam

LiquidAir

If you get the expsoure and white balance exactly right in camera the advantage of RAW over JPEG is not very significant for many images. Formal portraits are one of those situations where the lighting is well enough controlled that you can shoot JPEG and not pay a significant price. That said, if you find the processing time on RAWs to be a significant overhead, you should try the Adobe Lightroom Beta. When I got my 5D, I started shooting RAW+JPEG. I used the JPEGs as proofs and RAW for the finished product. Once I got an efficient RAW workflow worked out in Lightroom I stopped capturing the JPEGs and never looked back. I personally found that the JPEGs were cluttering my process because managing both the JPEGs from the camera and JPEG exports from Lightroom became more trouble than it was worth. Now I generate my proofs from a Lightroom export and usually (but not always) the final product goes through Photoshop.