The upside of this heat, combined with the smoke and haze from all of the wildfires, are some pretty amazing sunsets. I drove up the highway to Cochrane last night to catch the sunset, and wound up shooting 207 photos in under an hour. I made myself delete all but 5 of them, which was much harder than I thought it would be.
I shot most photos in fine large jpeg mode, but shot many in RAW. The RAW shots are much nicer, with all of the rich shades of orange and red being captured more faithfully. Here’s one I took just after the sun sank below the horizon:
That was shot RAW, and converted to JPEG using Digital Photo Professional, since iPhoto’s conversion was painfully washed out.
Here are the other 4 survivors, all shot in jpeg:
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Breathtaking, simply breathtaking.
Keep on Babbling!
Well done – I haven't had a chance to do the photosafari thing yet – but the sunsets here have been amasing as well. The cull the the thing when you shoot in RAW I guess. Especially if it's one "subject".
One thing that I have noticed – when I'm shooting shots that I want to be "real keepers" – I tend to convert the RAWs to TIFF rather than jpeg, the colors are righer and when they get printed larger, they tend to turn out better. Otherwise, just snapshooting babies and candid events, jpeg still rules the roost if for no other reason than I can hold more on the memory card – until I get some 2GB cards for RAW shooting. I've got a friend's wedding that is coming up over the long weekend and even though I'm doing the video for it and there is a pro doing the photos (the same guy who shot mine incidentally), I'm going to shoot as much as I can for a slideshow that will go along with the video – in RAW+L jpeg just to see what that process would be like as well.
Raj – the problem is knowing ahead of time what the keepers will be… The barbed wire was sort of a throwaway shot – I was walking to get an angle on something else, saw the wire and thought “I wonder what that would look like” – and never thought to drop into raw mode first… Doh…
Oh, to have an 8GB card and an XRAID in the basement…
culling is crucial. I shot 90% of the photos in jpeg mode, the other in raw, and I still wound up with almost 800MB of images. I don’t have the drive space to maintain that amount of extra stuff. And culling forced me to play editor, and critique all of the shots, which was good. Have to work on my photographic frontal lobe…