JPEG/RAW for weddings

digismile

Jon,

I'm reading this a couple of days late ... I didn't see much participation in Talk Like a Pirate Day this year, but this made me laugh. (but still got the message ...)

SloYerRoll wrote:

Well hang me from the mizen mast!
I can only be speakin for the handful of true salts that do this skalywaggin for a livin!

It be quite apearant I've had too much rum and I'll be never postin in this thread again.

Arrrgghgh!

Art Scott

Why would a pro event photog want to give up all the ability of raw just to save a little space by using jpg and also the loss of working latitude......I wouldn't even buy a camera until I could get one that shot raw (and had an iso rating less than 200, my prefered shooting iso is 50) cause I wanted all the working latitude I could get......but then again I came from the film era of photogs and the films working latitude was a great decideing point for us....I did not shoot fast moving sports os I used the lower ISO films, in all my years I only used at the most 4 rolls of ISO 400 film all the thousands of frames shot for portraits, weddings and concerts was shot at iso 100 and 50............now due to the differences between film and digital I HAVE to shoot the upper limits (800 -3200 iso) a lot for concerts, dance and such.....I know I could not produce exceptable images without raw files to work with.....

So I must say that I agree with Scott Q. wholeheartedly.............

vdotmatrix

Weddings are high anxiety tightrope work. I have shot a few weddings. Sweating bullets after my first shoot with chrome film 2 f-stops over exposed, or was it under...How embarrassing.

Then I carried 2 camera bodies around my neck and at the ready.

RAW is your only insurance against ruining your reputation. If you are an f-stop off or more you can pull the rabbit out with RAW editing software.

You should have (2) 1-2GB cards per body. You don't want to have everything on ONE lousy card. Just think if something happens...cuz shit happens and then they hate you and sue you for being a cheapskate.

If you are going to shoot weddings, have a contract(s) they sign so you don't have any surprises for both parties.

You know what? I hate shooting weddings. They mostly all end in divorce. The trailer park weddings at the holiday Inn are a bit much to stomach....And anything held at someplace like the National Cathedral, you had better have you crap wound pretty tight.... so, yeah, shoot everything in RAW...... With JPEG, everytime you save that file you loose a little bit of data.....ouch... good luck....

Icebear wrote:

I do mostly architectural photography, but I've been approached about doing weddings. For my architectural work, I connect the D200 to a Digital Workstation (yeah, I know it's a laptop, but you can charge them more if you call it a Digital Workstation) and run it off a/c. No issues about battery life or chip size - images go right to the hard drive.

Anyway here's my question: Do youse guys and gals who do weddings shoot everything in RAW? Geeze Louise, with D200s, at 16megabytes a pop, if you push the button 500 times, that's almost two DVDs :wow . Yeah, I know, I gotta buy bigger CF cards, but that's a given.

Seriously, what I've been considering is to do the formals and ceremony shots with the D200 in RAW, and do most of the heavy lifting at the reception with the D70 (and the D200) on Fine JPEG. Any thoughts? Oh, I have Lightroom and PS CS3 if that affects your opinion.

Antonio Correia

This matter is very much discussed here and elsewhere.
I stepped into this a while ago and I found quite interesting.

Today, I have no doubts: I only shoot RAW.
I have been throught the process of shooting RAW, then shooting JPG and now I changed for good to RAW.

I have felt that this was the issue.:D


The results are better throught RAW.

mercphoto

Amy and I have seen a lot of wedding photographers the last month or so. And we've seen a lot that, to my eye, were obviously JPG shooters. What usually brought it out was an obvious issue with the color balance not quite right, the exposure not quite right. The one's who get the images spot-on were shooting RAW and adjusting images after the fact. They usually charge more, and it shows.

I used to be a pro-JPG person, especially when shooting 1,000 to 1,500 images at a motocross race. But learning a good, solid RAW workflow changed that. No reason why a professional wedding photographer can't deal with a large number of RAW files if I could.

Oh, and our wedding photog shoots RAW.

Antonio Correia

When I was in the "transition period" I was shooting RAW and JPG at the same time.

By then, I was not yet able to see the difference.

I was shooting RAW because "people" was saying it was a good option to make.

But I was trying to learn by myself.

And I know now that shooting RAW is better.

However, the card doesn't eat the photos very fast and sometimes I find myself wating for the camera to write the photos in the CF.

And I use Sandisk Extreme III with the 20 D and the 350 D !

Need a faster computer to work with these files.

mercphoto

Antonio Correia wrote:

When I was in the "transition period" I was shooting RAW and JPG at the same time. By then, I was not yet able to see the difference.

I, too, didn't see the difference between RAW and JPG until I read Real World Adobe Camera RAW. It was then that I understood how to twiddle the knobs in the raw converter to actually make a difference. I began to suspect that those who cannot see a difference between RAW and JPG are those who do default conversions from RAW. At that point all you're doing is replicating on the computer what the camera would have done, and of course it will look the same. Learn how to judge and manually twiddle the settings though and things will look better.

Antonio Correia

Yes Bill.
I am very used to see if lines and surfaces are straight in the construction building.
Sometimes I just look and say it is twisted when others don't see anything.
Practice. Practice. Trained eye.

mmmatt

I'm certainly not the most experienced person around here but I will make a couple of comments on the jpg vs raw thing, and more importantly (to me anyways) backing up files. It just seems foolish to me to not take advantage of the raw files. If there was a dissadvantage other than storage then maybe, but there isn't. How about a tiff file? What is the size of a single 12MP tiff... like a gig?:puke

As for storage I use one of these http://www.compactdrive.com/product_info.php?products_id=31 (mine is actually similar to this but another brand that I bought w/o a drive on ebay for $50 and installed a 60GB drive) in conjunction with 2 4GB cards and 2 2GB cards. This allows me to shoot through a card, then dump it to the drive while shooting the next one. Then when I get home, I already have a HD backup of all my files which I dump to both DVD and another drive for permanent storage. I don't dump the portable drive until I need the space so I have big time redundancy.

I also use MD5 file verification which allos me to fingerprint the original files and verify that they are exact duplicates of the original. The compactdrive I listed above does file verification when you drop the card, then the md5 file I create on the portable drive before I back that up is created by one of many programs, md5summer being a popular one or the one I use is part of a program designed for lossless audio compression http://www.etree.org/mkw.html .

My backup proceedure is card > portable drive on site, and then I create an md5 on the portable drive then portable > pc, then I create subfolders breaking the files into 4-4.7GB folders for DVD backup, then md5 those, then backup to DVD. On a fast(ish) machine, this takes about as long as it takes me to preview my images in a little slide show... maybe 30 minutes. Please understand that all this stems from my other love which is concert recording and this proceedure is fairly typical for us "tapers" as we are all about the acurate archival of the events we record.

Matt