Monday, April 11, 2011

Love Ya Willie!


A little tune to play while you're enjoying the rather crappy photo below.

Jay'me went to the Dells. I was supposed to join her (and the other 2.9million people there this weekend) but instead was diverted to my hometown in Iowa.
Jay'me snapped her photo from the car window. It inspired me to do the same.

My trusty driver (Hi Mom!) was less than excited at the prospect of me motioning to an over the road trucker and getting his permission to take a photo of his front tire in motion. Sigh. Parents...
So I snapped this as we flew past the oil truck doing 72 (in a 70mph speed zone).


Nikon D300s
Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8
ISO 200
Shutter speed 1/2500sec
Aperture f/2.8

I really had intended to change my aperture. I wanted to get as large of a focal point as possible. But, when shooting on the fly you sometimes forget the most basic of principles.

To not make this post totally suck I'm going to include my personal opinion on JPEG vs RAW photos.
As I said, this is just my opinion. As we all know opinions are like.. well.. you know. I'll keep it rated G.

Way back in the day (circa 2007) when I got my first DSLR, I shot in RAW and JPEG format. My computer quickly filled up and I ran out of hard drive space. I switched to JPEG only (circa 2008). Until my recent purchase of the D300s I stayed that way and never really thought much about it.
Right before I got the new camera I also got an huge external hard drive (thanks Mom and Dad). I backed up my 4.2million photos and cleared off most of my internal hard drive. So when the D300s showed up I chose to shoot in RAW and JPEG once again.
Immediately upon downloading the first pictures I noticed a real difference in the quality of the photos between the RAW and JPEG formats. I was impressed. The RAW really did seem to make a difference.
Fast forward to my first major round of edits. I LOVE editing a RAW photo. It's so quick and easy to make any small corrections that might be necessary. Shooting in RAW has absolutely changed how much time I spend editing. I didn't spend much time before but now I spend next to nothing. It's absolutely worth it to me to me to take up a little more drive space to get the better, faster photo.

All that said, get the photo right in camera and you really won't have any editing time. And you might also be living in an alternate universe that I would like to live in with you.

RAW or JPEG? What do you shoot in?

3 comments:

  1. Fun and sunny too! Neat it is! Love the amount of sky captured, it almost tricks us into thinking it's the real sky. Great shot and I'm going to try the raw vs jpeg.

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  2. I love Willie! Another one of those songs that brings back childhood memories. What a fun shot you took, I love the semi-warped car look haha. I have always used a lot of RAW photos because of the ease of playing around with them and the quality is just sooo much better. We also had to get a super large external hard drive for all my pictures. The biggest downsize I had with RAW was when I was on vacation and taking lots of pictures. I had to either have a super large memory card or several so I wouldn't run out of memory. That's a little bit easier now with my laptop. Have fun shooting with RAW.

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  3. Sere, I totally thought of you when I posted Willie. I knew you would love it. Some things never change. Thank God.

    Jay'me go to RAW. You'll be so glad you did. I really under served that camera shooting in JPEG.

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