shooting raw

[Pentaxopithecus]

I kicked off playing at photography in JPEG namely 'cos I'd never heard of RAW to begin with, believe it or not! I read about it via a free booklet that came with some tog' journal or another, however, and became curious about it. I eventually took the plunge and set my Pentax K10D to RAW. I combined this change with the over exposure warning and histogram and thereafter set about playing at photography with renewed interest. The net result of all this was that the over exposure feature did nothing but tell me I'd banjaxed another photograph, the histogram told me about as much as a cardiograph and suddenly I couldn't open my photographs on the computer any more!
I had two option here...drop kick the camera down the garden, or learn about these settings properly instead of employing them in a half-assed way. Having resisted the former as a means of resolving the issue, I will admit to finding the RAW format a distinct advantage (once I'd installed the disc supplied with the camera) in terms of recovering a percentage of my error riddled images, though this was of course somewhat countered by having to spend a lot more time trying to do so. Eventually the penny (via the combined written wisdom of numerous pro's) dropped and I'm slowly working upon getting it as near to ideal as I can when I shoot and thus reduce the post processing time to subtle tweaks. So I'd say go RAW, and stay RAW...
...And as a by-the-by, the over exposure warning now tells me when I'm slipping into old habits, and the histogram is telling me when my photographs have a healthy heart beat (so to speak)

Bob.

[jcuknz]

I may have missed the reference in this long thread but having given my 16Mp G3 camera to my son who previously shot jpg but with this new beastie has decided to shoot RAW as he is now 'serious' and while delighted with what he can do with Lightroom his problem is RAW uses up his storage space too quickly, horribly so .... I think I gave him an 8 GB card in the camera ....Since I to date only regularly shoot jpgFINE I can still remember when a couple of 500Mb cards did all I needed with an 8Mp camera

[rpcrowe]

These days, I don't think that memory space should be the reason for not shooting in RAW...

I hope it is not too cavalier to say that camera memory is cheap because what is "cheap" for one person can be seem quite "expensive" for another person who is in a different geographic area or a different economic status. OTOH: in comparison to the earlier cost of camera memory, memory cards are now quite a bit less expensive. This is especially true for SD cards which some cameras use. I remember when a one GIG CF card was considered enormous and was quite expensive.

However, in comparison with other camera equipment, memory represents a small portion of the ultimate cost of photo equipment. I use CF cards in all my DSLR cameras and I still have some of the original cards that I started using over ten years ago even though these cards are quite small for today's uses with the rather large files of my Canon 7D.

I started shootng in JPEG years ago because the thought of RAW frightened me. I then switched over to shooting RAW + JPEG. I soon realized that I never touched the JPEGs and did all my work with my RAW images so, I quit shooting RAW + JPEG and have never regretted that decision.

One of my reasons for eliminating the JPEG capture was not so much the total memory used but, that it seemed to me that my cameras wrote RAW + JPEG to the memory cards a bit more slowly than when I shot RAW alone which was only noticeable in burst shooting.

I have a several 4 GB CF cards, two 16 GB CF cards and any number of one and two GB cards which I use for backup. I just inserted a fresh 16GB CF card into my 7D and it indicates that I have space for 604 RAW images. Two of those cards will provide about 1,208 images. I seriously don't see myself shooting many more than 1,200 images during a single day of shooting. This is especially true since I always carry two cameras on any serious photo jaunt. But, if for some reason I would need more imagery, I could use my 1 and 2 GIG cards to make up the difference. I most often use the several 4 GIG cards (I got these Lexar cards for $10 U.S. Dollars each - on sale) with my 40D camera since the files from that camera are smaller than those from my 7D.

Since, even when traveling; I will always have a computer with me, my workflow is to download the CF cards in the evening after a day of shooting. I then copy the files to a pair of high capacity (small physical size) remote hard drives and then after the downloading and copying is done, I reformat my CF cards and charge camera and flash batteries When traveling enroute, I will carry one hard drive and my wife will carry the second duplicate hard drive. That is just an extra safety precaution against loss of my images...