Hey Everyone! Hope you had a great week! I had a great one. Last weekend me and some of my photography friends went to Boston and we had a blast.  Last week I went through the pro's and con's of JPEGS and RAW formant photographs and the experiment that I was going to undertake on this trip. Well spoiler alert it went great!  I decided to shoot in RAW + JPEG but instead of using the RAW as my main photo I was going to use the JPEG and see how it went.  It worked great. I took almost 1000 photos and only used the JPEGs to edit and post with in LightRoom and they looked great!  I even took my experiment a little farther and I used my Full Frame Sony and prime lenses for the first two days and used my Canon Point and shoot for the last two days.  And all of the photographs looked good. The Full frame may have Boston Harbor at Night done better in low light but that seemed to be the only advantage to it over the Point and shoot. The point and shoot was more stealthy than the full frame.

So talking about going full circle.  When I first started in digital I started with a point and shoot camera then a crop sensor camera then a full size DSLR then I went to a Crop Sensor Mirrorless to a Point and shoot camera .  I started shooting in Film then Digital Jpegs then RAW and with this trip to JPEG. When I started in photography I was shooting in Manual only, then went to Automatic modes on my cameras.  And with all the Revere Beach Sunrise Boston camera's and formats I always got good results.  I always had good looking photographs. So what does all of this mean?  Well for one thing I'm not always going to shoot in RAW.  Only when there is a time and place for it.  I'm not going to shoot in Manual all of the time. Only when there is a time and place for it. And I always don't have to shoot with the Full Frame camera. Only when there is a time and place for it. When will I shoot RAW, JPEG, Manual Settings, Automatic Settings, Full Frame, Crop Sensor or Point and shoot? Lets go through the list.

RAW Format- Landscape work , Portraits , Astro anything that require some more intense post processing. Stairs and Shadows Boston  

JPEG Format- Shooting Street, Sport, Wildlife and everyday stuff that I can quickly edit.

Manual Settings- When I'm on a tripod. Dragging the Shutter. Or having to overcome some drastic lighting situation that the camera can't figure out.

Auto Settings.- Almost all of the time except when mentioned above.

Full Frame camera- Portraits, Street, Still life

Crop Sensor camera- Landscape , Sport, Wildlife

Point and Shoot camera.- Everyday shooting, Street

Piano Man What it really comes down to is that it really doesn't matter what equipment or how you adjust your camera or what format you shoot in you can still make great photographs because a camera doesn't take the photograph you make the photograph.  Thats what I've found out with this big experiment.  I will start to use my point and shoot without worrying about quality issues. I won't shoot in RAW all of the time because there is no need for it. If you have a somewhat modern camera it will let you make great photographs not mater what brand or size.

There was one more thing that came out of this experiment that I wasn't expecting to happen. All of the photographs that were taken in Boston were edited on an iPad mini. That's right! Nothing was edited on my desktop or a laptop. It was fairly seamless .  I created an Album in Lightroom on my iPad and added all the photo's from each day.  They were automatically synced with my Lightroom Classic on my Mac at home. All the edits I made were synced through the cloud to my main computer.  I didn't have to upload anything when I got home they were already there. All 1000 photo's. Editing on the iPad was easy I just had to get used to Lightroom instead of Lightroom Classic that I'm used to. Using the apple pencil made editing easy.  I liked that I wasn't tied down to a computer to do edits I could do them anywhere. I'm going to keep trying this editing process to see how I like it.  Whats nice about it is that if I want to do some heavy edits its on my Mac the photo's are there already where I can do anything to it. As most of my edits are light ones the iPad seems to be the new thing I didn't know that I needed to incorporate into my editing flow. More to come on this subject as I learn more.

Be open to new ideas and maybe some old ones too to make your photography more fun and exciting.  So take what camera you have and get out and shoot! Make some great photography!