Crazy But Able

I made a video on Youtube for Amy explaining how awesome taking pictures in RAW mode is.

Now, my natural inclination is to say something like “you should consider using RAW mode to get the most quality out of your images,” because my natural inclination is to avoid conflict. But the more I think about it, the more I think that if you’re not shooting in RAW mode you are wasting your time. Why did you spend so much money for a camera if you’re going to throw away 93 percent of the data your sensor captures? I regret every shot I have ever taken in JPG mode with my 20D. Many of my early pictures are useless because I did not shoot in RAW.

RAW files take too much space? Please. 500 GB hard drives run 89 bucks these days, and last week I saw a terabyte drive on sale at Best Buy for 160. In 2007 I shot 19,125 pictures, and those pictures take up 119 gigs of space on my hard drive. At that rate it will take over 8 years to fill one terabyte hard drive.

Not all cameras have RAW mode, of course. But if you have a sufficiently advanced digital camera you have RAW mode. Did you pay more than 500 bucks new for your camera? Does it have a detachable lens? Then you probably have RAW mode. Enable it! Buy Lightroom and be happy! Lightroom has a 30 day free trial too.

The only reason to not enable RAW mode is if you don’t care about the last 10-20 percent of image quality. And that’s fine as far as it goes. I mean, I know at least 3 DSLR owners (none of whom read my weblog, so I’m not talking about you) who don’t care about that last 10-20 percent of image quality, and never will. But if you bought your camera because you care about photography, and not because it’s a pretty toy, then just enable RAW mode; it’s a no brainer!

Alright, end of rant. Got that out of my system. Don’t know what got into me; most of the time I’m a “gentle persuader” kind of person but I must be in a mood at the moment.

The other thing I did recently is buy a Flip video camcorder (which was a disaster; I’ve already returned it, more on that later). Here’s a video I shot of C in our backyard with the Flip:

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.