“This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums (23-29 Jan ‘11)” plus 1 more: Digital Photography School

This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums (23-29 Jan ‘11)

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 03:11 PM PST

Weekly Assignment

We finished up our Spot of Colour assignment this week. Using a spot of colour can have a big impact on where your eye travels in a photograph, especially though the use of bright or light colours. Our winners this week all successfully, and creatively, used a spot of colour in their photographs. Our winner this week was phillj blue bucket on the beach. This shot had a clear spot of colour, the composition was good with the way that the line of the water almost leads your eye right to the bucket, and overall it seemed to tell a story. Nicely done! Our first runner up was ttyler’s “Don’t Push It”, the shot of the typewriter keys. That red really stands out nicely, and it creates a nice, simple, almost graphical shot. And last but not least was Shutterbugdeb’s bright red lipstick. This shot was very nicely done, and very vivid. The red really stands out, and it’s clear that it’s not selectively coloured from the small amounts of colour elsewhere. It makes it very clear what colour is meant to stand out here. Well done everyone!

Our newest assignment is Still Life: Food. For some of us, it’s a very dreary part of the year. It’s cold, the weather is less than ideal, and that can make it much more difficult to want to pick up the camera. But food still life shots are a great way to be creative without having to deal with the less than ideal weather. Food shots are a staple of still life photography. They can resemble the paintings of years past, or they might be the kind you would see in a cookbook, but either way, we want you to set up a food photo for this week’s assignment. As always, a quick reminder of the rules. First, your photo must have been taken between 19 January – 2 February 2011. Second, your post must include the words: “Still Life: Food” in order to show that that you have given your permission to be included in the contest, and the date that the photo was taken in order to show that it is eligible. Finally, your EXIF should be intact, and it’s useful if you can include some of the main points, such as camera, lens, aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc. in the text of your post. Please limit yourself to one entry per person during the first week of the contest. Next week we will be looking at still life photos once again. But this time, our subject will be Still Life: Flowers. Flowers might seem like an overdone topic in photography, but we still photograph them. And as much as we love to photograph them, sometimes it is hard to get a good shot. Remember, this isn’t about taking a shot of your garden, this is a still life. So consider the design and placement of your subject, composition, and lighting. Good luck everyone!

Post from: Digital Photography School

The Basics of RAW files {and what to do with the darn things}

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 10:13 AM PST

I was shooting a wedding once and the father-of-the-bride ‘knew a lot about photography’. I was literally laughing out loud (trying so terribly hard to hold it in) when I would adjust the dials and hear him say over my shoulder “mmmm oh yes you’re probably changing the white balance hmmm?” And best of all, “if you’re really professional you shoot in raw.”

Raw. It’s the ultimate test of someone’s acceptance of your status as a professional because it’s one of the first things that a mildly keen just-starting-out-er will pick up on in their search for photography knowledge. But even though it’s one of the first things you’ll likely learn, it’s also one of the most confusing elements for a beginner.

I’m a control freak. I don’t want to work my butt off to pull every element of an image together and then lose control of my colour temp in post processing. I want to control everything about the final product. If it were possible, I would even come to every single one of your houses and calibrate the world’s computer screens to see things exactly the same. Before you can love raw, you have to understand it.

{Basically…}

If you’re shooting in jpeg and you hit the shutter to let all the beautiful light flood your sensor and record the image onto your memory card, the camera collects the information and quickly compresses it down into a reasonably sized file. It judges things like the colour of the sky and the temperature of the light. Even when you’ve taken the image in manual mode and set everything yourself, the jpeg still needs to make some decisions as it smooshes all that information into one little file.
But if you shoot in raw, the sensor stays hands-off and says “ok, hot shot. YOU deal with it!”
…this means that you have total, blissful control of your entire image.
…but not without some work of your own.
RAW files need to be imported into a computer program like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and then either instantly exported as jpegs (yikes!)
…or perfected according to your vision for the image with editing and then exported as a jpg or other printer-friendly format.
So just to make sure you get it I’ll say it this way: a raw file isn’t an image. It’s information gathered by the sensor and delivered to you on a memory card. It’s totally your job to then do what you want with that information before compressing it into an ‘image’.
Also, a raw file won’t usually have included the in-camera sharpening that jpeg compression provides. So don’t fret when you think your image isn’t as sharp as it should be – this also needs to be done by you in the post production editing process.

Here are some links to set you on your path to opening and utilizing your raw files:

You can process your raws with Google’s free program called Picasa. This is an article about how to process raw files in Picasa and this is a list of supported file types.
This article from Apple is FAQs about processing your raws in iPhoto
Bridge is another option and also useful if you're likely to be utilising many different Adobe programs from your computer. Exe: Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. It's a base from which you can spring to any of these programs. If you're only using PS, it's not really necessary, although Helen Bradley has a great post on about the ways she thinks Bridge is useful.
This is a tutorial written by me, before I learned how to make videos. Full of screen shots to show you how I import my files into Lightroom and export them out when I’m finished editing.
This is the Wikipedia entry for ‘raw image format’. Scroll down to ’software support’ and you’ll find a pretty huge list of software at your disposal for processing your raw files.