Elvis in Window "I only shoot in RAW because only amateurs will shoot in JPEG."  Have you heard this or something simular to this?  I have and I probably have said it myself.  Don't get me wrong.  I still think shooting RAW is the best way to shoot.  But what's wrong with a JPEG?  That's what you see when you look at your photo on the LCD screen of your camera.  And I bet that's what you see 99% of the time on your computer and mobile device.  So why shouldn't we shoot in JPEG too?  How many times have you gotten home after a shoot and what you saw on the back of your camera is what you wanted in the first place and you had to spend time processing your RAW photo to get back to the JPEG rendering that was on the back of your camera?  I know I have.  We have very powerful cameras that we have paid a lot of money for.  The technology of these cameras is amazing!  We have WiFi and all of these modes that we can shoot in.  But if you're like me, you're shooting in RAW and spending time on the computer changing photos to get them to look like what's on the back of your camera or changing them to B/W.  Why don't we let the camera do this for us?  I listen to a lot of podcasts (a future blog), and I started hearing about shooting in RAW+JPEG.  And there are some really good reasons to do so.  This weekend I shot in RAW + JPEG for the first time, and I loved it!  Flag Sail

Shooting in RAW+JPEG lets you use the power of your camera for processing your images.  First, you shoot in RAW because of all of the reasons that you've always heard about.  You can correct all of the mistakes better, you can change the white balance on the fly, you can do a lot of stuff with a RAW file that you just can't do with a JPEG.  But at the end of the day how many photographs do you really do all of this heavy lifting of the shadows and really working the photograph?  The answer for me is not much.  This weekend I went out with my photography club and I took 300 photographs.  Out of those 300, I really only had to work hard on one photograph to make it look the way I wanted.  And I had the RAW file to do that with. When you shoot RAW, what you download onto your computer isn't what you saw on the back of your camera.  So you spend time getting that RAW image to look like the JPEG that you saw.  Why not just use the JPEG if it looks the way you want it to out of camera?  Why spend the time making the RAW look like your JPEG?  Just use the JPEG.

_MSP9038 I love black and white photography.  When I shot film, that was what I shot most of the time.  Did you know you can set your camera up to shoot RAW + JPEG and then set your camera profile to shoot B/W.  You will now get the RAW file with all of the color and all of the info and a JPEG in B/W.  You will also see on the back of your camera the photo in B/W.  And I'm telling you the JPEG rendering is very good!  Your camera company has spent a lot of time and research money to make them look great!   The most work you'll have to do in post is crop.  Depending on your camera you may have many modes:  portrait, vivid, B/W, sepia, sunset, and many more to play with.  This will free up your creativity because you know you always have that RAW file in the background if you need it.

Using WiFi and posting to social media.  Posting to social media is what I do with most of my photographs.  Cameras have been out with WiFi for quite a while, but how many of us actually use them?  I must admit that I don't use it often.  But using the JPEG file makes it easier because there is less processing that needs to be done, and the file is smaller and easier to transfer via WiFi.  I did this this weekend (Memorial Day Weekend).  I went to my local Veterans Cemetery and took some shots of the tombstones with the flags.  I sent the JPEG to my phone using WiFi, sent it to "Snap Seed" to do a little crop, and then sent it to social media.  And it looked great!  I could have done this with my iPhone, but I wouldn't have gotten the shot I wanted.

Would I do this for all types of photography?  No, I wouldn't.  I wouldn't do this for portrait photography.  Landscape? Maybe. Sports, no.  I would shoot JPEG.  But photography like travel, urban, street, and almost anything else I would.  And I will.  So the next photo walk you do, try RAW+JPEG and see what you get.  You'll be surprised.  Have fun and keep shooting!

Screen Shot 2018-02-03 at 7.16.10 AM Hey everyone!  I have done a few blogs and videos on different portions of my process but haven't really gone through the whole thing.  So just imagine that you've just gotten back from an outing of shooting and you have taken all of these great photos.  You've looked at them on the back of your camera, but you need to get them off and into your computer for processing.  I shoot in RAW format.  But when looking at the back of your camera, you're looking at JPEGs which have been compressed and have been processed by your camera.  So if you really like the photo that's on the back of your camera, you still have some work to do to make the RAW file with no corrections to look like the back of your camera. We also want to safeguard our images, make backups for safety in case of equipment failure.  So now you have your SD card with all of your images on it.  This is Copy 1 of your images.  Let's get the images onto your computer.

Import into Lightroom

Getting the images onto my computer, I will hook up a card reader and insert my SD card.  I use Adobe Lightroom to do almost all of my editing and all of my organizing. I have made a video that is a couple of years old, and it's basically how I do things now, except I don't store any of my photos on the hard drive of the computer.  I keep all of my photos on an external drive.  I also just copy to my external.  I "don't copy as DNG."  I still like the DNG, but it takes too long to convert.  Everything else is basically the same.  Lightroom stores everything in catalogs.  I have one master catalog that has all my images through the years in it.  It is stored on my main IMac computer.  When I'm traveling or camping, I have a mobile catalog that is stored on an SSD external drive so I can edit and cull photographs while I'm away.  When I get back home, I can transfer those photos back to the master catalog with all my edits from my mobile computer/laptop intact.  Think of the Lightroom catalog like your iTunes library.  All of your images edits are kept there like all of your music on iTunes library.  Notice I said all images "edits" are kept there.  Your original RAW files are still on your hard drive, whether it's internal or external. Here is the link to the import video that I have on YouTube.  

Importing into Lightroom

Library Module and Culling

After you have your photos in Lightroom, the culling process starts.  This is choosing the best images (the ones you want to process).  This can be Arrows and blocksArrows and blocks. Correlation of the parts. Relations. a big job!  If you say took 500 images, out of those images you'll probably only have maybe 50 at the most that are worth processing.  So getting down to the 50 or 20 good photos that you want to process is culling.  There are many ways to do this, and you kind of have to figure this out for yourself.  But this is how I do it.  I go through four or five images at a time and pick the ones I like by rating them to a "1" rating.  I do this very quickly, and here is my logic for this.  When you walk into a room full of people, it doesn't take but a few seconds for you to find the prettiest/most handsome in the room.  Our mind's eye picks out the person in a flash and will also find the best photo in a flash.  Now after going through the photos, I have knocked out the 500 number to about 100 real quick.  Then if I need to I'll do it again and rate a 2  to the best photo and I have knocked the images down to 25.  I can process those photos and then I can pick all of the unrated photos and delete them.  By doing this you will keep the number of useless photos down and keep the speed of your computer up.  Now, I don't get rid of everything.  If I have photos with family or friends in them, I usually keep them.  But the rest of the unrated photos are deleted.  I don't need 50 shots of the same tree that I will never use taking up space on my computer.  One or two will do.  Here is a video that I made a couple of years ago on the library module and my culling process.

Library Module and Culling 

Processing (Five-Step Tango)

tango-party-design-poster-vector-illustration_10083-26 My processing  procedure has not changed in many years.  I use a process called the five-step Tango that I hijacked from a photographer/teacher, Jack Davis, a long time ago, and it works well for me.  I usually take less than five minutes on most photos to process unless I'm doing a portrait or a composite that will take longer when I bring it into Photoshop. Some people really get into this portion of the workflow process and that's great.  But for me, the least amount of time I spend on the computer after a shoot the better.   I have a couple of videos on processing that I will link here also.  Here is the link to the YouTube videos.

Five Step Tango

Lightroom Develop Module Part 1

Lightroom Develop Module Part 2

Exporting Photos

fb-art Now that you have your photos processed, what next?  How do you share what you have done so far?  In the film era, you sent your film away or you processed it yourself and had prints made.  Today you have many options.  You can share with family and friends many ways through the internet.  Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, 500px are just some of the ways you can share your images.  What about prints?  What about Canvas?  Putting your photos into calendars, cups, stickers?  For me personally, most of the photos I take flickr and process are shared through the internet with the above-mentioned websites and of course this site!  I love to see the feedback and ratings I get from these sites and friends.  I also create a couple of canvases and I do print small for my house or family and friends, usually 5x7 and 8x10's.  But what about the future when I'm long gone?  I think prints are one way for future generations so see my work.  I've also started making books.  We did this for an end-of-year project this year with my camera club, and it was pretty great.  So that's one project that I will be doing yearly and maybe for large trips in the future.

Storage

I still have my original RAW photos on my SD card.  I also have another copy of them on my external drive that I have been using for all of my edits.  In the digital age at least two copies of your work is needed to be safe that you don't lose what you have done.  So now I have to place the SD card back into my camera to use again.  So I will need to format the card which will erase all of my RAW data, and I will only have one copy of my images.  I have done many backup strategies in the past, and the one discussed in my last blog post Backup Strategies (check out that blog for more detail)  is the one that I use now.  Backing up to a cloud-based storage.  That backs up my main computer and external drives.  But what about my laptops and mobile devices?  I also back those up to external drives every couple of weeks or so using time machine or PC's backup program.  I'm real big into backups after I had my Macbook Pro have some problems with a video card and I had to have the motherboard replaced.  I had just done a backup of my laptop.  So when I got it back from Mac, I just ran a restore and it was back to where I left it and I didn't lose anything.   By having one copy of my files at home and one on the cloud, if anything happens like a fire, a hard drive crash, or a stolen computer, I still have a backup on the cloud.

I hope this helps in some way and doesn't confuse anyone.  This is my workflow process, and it works for me and for what I do in photography.  I am not a professional photographer, just a photography enthusiast/hobbyist who loves to share.  Keep shooting!

_MSP6749 Hey Everyone! Hope everyone is dealing with the cold weather better than I am.  As I get older the cold affects me more than it used to.  Anyway, this blog is about my mobile computing solution.  I have two main computers.  Both are Macs:  my iMac, which has a 27-inch Retna screen which is awesome, and a 15- inch Macbook Pro that is awesome!  It's an older one, but I have upgraded the ram and the hard drive and it's quick and works great. To replace it would be very expensive with a new model, and then to have it broken or stolen would break my heart.  And it's pretty large and heavy compared to newer models.  So I wanted to get a mobile computing device that ticked three boxes. Box 1, it had to be inexpensive so if it broke or got lost not a big deal.  Box 2, it had to be small and lightweight.  And Box 3, it had to be able to run Lightroom so I could backup files to an external hard drive.  So I went on a search for the machine that would tick those three boxes.  And let me tell you that was hard, but I finally made a _MSP6753 decision and went with a machine that will work.

The machine I went with was the Lenovo Miix 320.  It is a 2-inch laptop/tablet with 4 gb ram and 128 SSD hard drive.  The operating system is Windows 10 64bit with a 10.1 display at 1920x1200 resolution. It has a detachable keyboard and can be used as a tablet. I got this machine refurbished off of Ebay, and it looks like brand new.  I was a little nervous ordering it off of Ebay, but everything worked out okay.  This little machine has ticked all of the boxes mentioned above.

Box 1, had to be inexpensive.  My goal was to try to keep the price under $300, which is almost impossible, so that's why I went with refurbished.  That actually kept the price down and brought in all kinds of computers that were available.  I wanted a laptop that had a real operating system not a Crome Book that are selling for the price range that I want.  This machine came in at $199!  Tick!

Box 2, small and lightweight.  This little 10-inch screen machine only weights 2.2 lbs.  It does have a small screen, but the resolution is great and sharp.  The keyboard is crunched together a bit, but it has full-sized keys and doesn't take long to get used to.  It's small enough to go into a small backpack or small shoulder bag. Tick!

Box 3, has to be able to run Lightroom and make backups to an external drive. This is probably the most important box of all.  The minimum ram requirement for Lightroom to run is 4 gb of ram, which this machine does have, just does. That's one of the reasons I wanted an SSD to increase the speed.  It does run Lightroom.  I won't be processing a lot of photos on it, but it's nice to know I can without any problems. The machine comes with 2 USB 2 ports and one USB C port, so transferring files via USB works fine. Tick!

_MSP6755 So this machine handled all of my criteria for my mobile machine.  Would I love to have a 13-inch Macbook Air?  You bet.  But they just cost way too much.  If money weren't a factor, that's the way I would go.  But it isn't.  I'm really surprised at how well this little computer works.  Browsing the internet and all other regular computer functions, this little computer works great.  It runs Lightroom well enough to process photos, cull, and backup with no problem, although it is a little slow but not that bad. I think that this little machine will work well for what I need when I go camping or on a photo outing without worry of theft or breakage.  I'm not really promoting any brand or operating system because I'm a die hard Mac guy, but for this purpose I hope this little machine will be the ticket!  Only time will tell.  Keep shooting!