Your "Shooting Quality"?

[wickerprints]

RAW if I care about what I'm doing, JPEG if it's for someone else/I'm not being paid/picture dumps.


What I mean by picture dumps is when I know I'm going to be shooting a zillion photos and I don't care or have the time to pick out and edit every single one. In other words, it's straight from the camera, no edits, here's the CD/DVD now go away.


RAW is all about taking ownership and pride in one's work. It means you care enough to pick the winners, look them over carefully, make adjustments, and when it's all done, you have a finished product that you are proud of and care enough to demonstrate provenance should it ever be questioned. It's only on the rare occasion that I'm doing something where I don't really care about the final result, but some examples would be if I am specifically doing a technical exercise, or if an acquaintance is asking me to shoot an event or something for free and I don't want to spend hours post-processing. I bring them hundreds of photos on a disk or thumb drive and they are just *giddy* with happiness because they got SO MANY shots for NOTHING. I'm basically just doing snapshots (oh, such a dirty word). On the other hand, if I were to slow down my shooting, save RAW, and post-process the winners, I might give them a few dozen really nice photos, and they'll be like, "That's all you took?!" [8-)]


Part of the trick of being a photographer is to understand your client's expectations, and to deliver on them, not what you expect from yourself. If every photo you took had to be up to your own personal standards, you'd exhaust yourself with wasted effort that is completely lost upon your client.

[tgbara]

LOL! That's great! "RAW if I care about what I'm doing, JPEG if it's for someone else/I'm not being paid/picture dump"


That's well said. Becaue when i open my RAW files in lightroom, i go over them painstaintly to make sure that every detail


is brought out in that 'digital negative'. My jpeg shots take up less space on my CF and i can't really edit them in lightroom.