The green mode discussion caused me to appreciate two different modes photographers can work in. When you press the shutter, are you looking for the file produced to be a final product in and of itself, or are you thinking of the entire workflow, and treating the RAW file as merely one stage in producing the final product?
The people that I expect wanting the final product from a shutter press would be: Snapshooters are the obvious ones. They don't care about the process, they often just want a recognizable photograph of important moments. I've heard people wax eloquent about their NEX because they don't need to know anything about photography to get pretty good photos, they just aim the camera, it figures out where the faces are, focuses on the faces, does it's digital magic and gets better photos than they ever could. Professionals on assignment are another obvious group wanting finished photos to spring from their camera like Athena from Zeus's head. The more time they spend diddling with photos, the less money they make. They aren't necessarily looking for the best possible photo, they're usually looking for a photo that is good enough in as little time as possible. I expect that the people who look at the raw file as the equivalent of a negative, rather than a final product would be people who want the best possible photo, or folks who are trying for some artistic vision that can't be achieved inside the camera. Realistically, the above descriptions aren't really of different people, but of different immediate goals. If I just need a photograph of where I plan to mount an attic fan to show my contractor, I don't need sufficient photographic quality to make a 20x30 print to hang in a gallery. I just need to convey the critical information. If I'm shooting an event, and could trust my camera to get everything to JPEG in sufficient quality to post to the web or make prints without using lightroom, I could probably shoot directly in JPEG. If I need to go through lightroom anyways, then JPEG doesn't really save me anything over RAW. The percussionist the other night was commenting that when photographing for customers to post on the web, he'd just set his camera to 6MP JPEG, and appreciated the much smaller filesize. In the same vein, every so often almost everyone finds something that they want to take the best photo that they can of, and will use every tool at their disposal. One of the things that I need to learn is to recognize what my goals of the moment are, and how to best fulfill them. I've been working on projects on the house lately, and have to keep reminding myself that when I'm doing construction carpentry, I don't need to work to machinist tolerances. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
