{"id":50,"date":"2006-12-24T19:29:23","date_gmt":"2006-12-25T00:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=50"},"modified":"2006-12-24T20:04:28","modified_gmt":"2006-12-25T01:04:28","slug":"50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=50","title":{"rendered":"Ooh, that’s raw."},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since buying a Canon 30D last summer, I’ve been thrilled with the picture quality. My guilty admission, however, is that I’ve fallen down on the job of being a tech geek. I’ve barely read the manual, and only know how to make the camera do the most rudimentary things. I still use the camera in semi-automatic mode, whereby I choose an aperture (depth of field), and let the camera choose the shutter speed for me. Sometimes I follow up on the auto-focus with a bit of manual focus. Because I hate the built-in flash, in low-light situations I set the ISO to 800 or 1000 and then open up to f\/2 or so. I also manually choose the white balance… but that’s about it.<\/p>\n

This week, visiting inlaws in North Carolina, I had some downtime to really look at the camera again. I ended up buying a nice book<\/a> which is both a introduction to photographic techniques in general, and a hands-on tour of my specific camera. I’m pretty happy with it.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind, I’m not a complete<\/i> photography newbie. I took a photography class in high school, and did lots of black & white shooting on an old 1980 Pentax ME-Super with an f\/1.4 lens. I had to set the aperture and shutter speed manually, and the most the camera would do is blink a little LED light-meter at me, to tell me if I was over- or under-exposing. I wish the class had taught me something about the artistic side of photography (like theory of composition), but instead I spent the whole semester learning how to develop black & white film by hand, getting covered with smelly chemicals.<\/p>\n

Anyway, my new book inspired me to do two crazy things: (1) turn on my camera’s auto-exposure bracketing feature, and (2) stop recording huge JPEG files, and switch to RAW files instead.<\/p>\n

The auto-bracketing thing is neat. I push my button and get three pictures instead of one. I’m not sure I’m going to use it all the time… but I can see that if I’m really worried about getting a good photo, it’s a nice form of insurance.<\/p>\n

The RAW file thing has left many impressions on me. First, I noticed that the camera displays the picture on its LCD faster, presumably because it’s not trying to do JPEG compression. Second, I noticed that the files are 9MB each, instead of 3MB. Yikes. Next, I’m hugely impressed with OS X: it just natively understands Canon’s raw (.CR2) format. I double-click on a file, and Preview.app displays it without fuss. (Alas, when I try to import my 30 .CR2 files into iPhoto, a few get in, but then the whole app crashes.) Finally, there is definitely<\/i> a quality difference between JPEG and RAW. It’s immediately obvious when I open the photo, and especially obvious when I start zooming. No artifacts, no blurs anywhere. I’m sold!<\/p>\n

I guess my next project is to actually learn to do<\/b> something with RAW files. I don’t own Photoshop, so I gotta find some free (or Free) software to play with white balance, color temperature, and so on. I can’t see color very well, so this could get… interesting.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since buying a Canon 30D last summer, I’ve been thrilled with the picture quality. My guilty admission, however, is that I’ve fallen down on the job of being a tech geek. I’ve barely read the manual, and only know how to make the camera do the most rudimentary things. I still use the camera […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}