Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Craft

  • Heartland – Spring, Redux

    Heartland – Spring, Redux

    Three weeks ago I wrote an article about reasons I don’t like spring. I thought I should update it and discuss my progression of getting comfortable with spring artistically. It happened via a driving trip through some of the heartland of America.

    Heartland

    You know, the flyover country. The middle section of the US that most of you have not been through, or at least, haven’t paid attention to. Most people try to avoid this area. There are long distances to drive and seemingly little to see. Unless you learn to appreciate what is there.

    I just got back from driving over 2000 miles without getting on a freeway at all. That was by choice. I love back roads and little towns. I believe driving on a freeway is a type of narcotic. Your senses blur and you get tunnel vision just looking at the road ahead. You become desensitized to the view or the geography or great scenes. And if you have expended effort to pass some slow trucks or campers you certainly can’t entertain the notion of stopping to take a picture. They would get ahead of you again.

    So I was making my way through eastern Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas and Ohlahoma. Like I said, most people would pay to fly to avoid these areas. Not me. I would pay more to drive it. A lot of it, not all of it, is very good country.

    This is true rural America. Not in a fake dude ranch type of tourist trap, but a land of farmers and ranchers. Hardworking people who earn an honest living and feed most of the rest of us in the process. Generally they are good people.

    Great year for it

    A few weeks ago I wrote a post talking about it being hard for me to get into spring. Coincidentally, this has been one of the prettiest springs in years. Where I live and most of the area I drove through had near record moisture this spring. Everything is exceptionally green. The grass and hay and crops are tall and healthy. The trees are very green and full.

    It became hard for me to not be seduced by the look of this year.

    Going for this long trip forced me to be immersed in it. I was there, I wanted to make good pictures, so I began to loosen up and find interesting subjects and compositions. I gave myself permission to stop whenever I wanted to look at things. Pretty soon I found myself liking more and more. Subjects became more frequent.

    Some of these things required miles of driving down dirt roads, even 2-track lanes. But there were usually rewards of things I have never seen of even imagined were there. Would you guess the image at the top of this blog is from Kansas? Even if you’ve been through Kansas 100 times, I bet you haven’t seen this.

    So now I feel I am fully “into” spring. I see it’s beauty and don’t currently waste my time and creativity longing for fall and winter. I am completely in the moment

    Wide open spaces

    This trip also steeped me in one of my favorite themes, wide open spaces. I saw a lot of them. There is something both compelling and a little frightening to me about a view with only the road and the horizon in the distance. It draws me to it while repelling me a little.

    There are occasional weathered abandoned houses and barns that add to the bleak beauty. I love composing these into scenes that portray the vast distances or bounty of crops.

    In a lot of these areas I just park my car in the middle of the road while I’m taking pictures. And I’m talking about setting up my tripod, composing perhaps several shots, maybe shooting HDR brackets or several long exposures to capture motion of the grass. Only 2 or 3 pickup trucks seem to come by a day, so I almost never inconvenience the locals.

    Jump into summer

    To be honest, this trip almost jumped me over spring into summer too quickly. I talked about the extraordinary moisture that made the vegetation very lush. But in the course of the trip we were hit with an abnormal heat wave that made things seems more like summer.

    In some parts of the trip the temperature was 108F. Add a 30-40 mph dry wind and conditions were not fun. That is good for showing the dynamics of the grass or wheat rippling furiously, but not pleasant to be out in.

    Amazing country

    I have made this journey before. I have family at the destination, so it was not just a random selection. Each time I go I try to take a different route, always avoiding freeways.

    Like almost every time I make it, I come back with a renewed love for this heartland area and the people there. It is a good place. Good country. It makes me feel better about America.

    At one point I stood at the exact geographic center of the contiguous 48 states. The point where a map of the 48 states would balance exactly. I couldn’t help thinking that I hope America can stay balanced. Revisiting the heartland would help.

  • How Many Pictures Do You Shoot?

    How Many Pictures Do You Shoot?

    Think back over the last month or so. How many pictures did you shoot and how often did you go out shooting? This idea jumped out at me listening to an interview with the great Jay Maisel. He uses this as a probe to find out about his students.

    Who cares how many?

    In reality, it should not matter to anybody else, except you, what your photogrpahy habits are. It’s a trick question in the sense that there is no right or wrong answer. At least not quantitatively.

    Jay uses the question as a probe to understand his student’s style and work habits. He would rather hear that you carry your camera all the time and shoot some every day. If you say you go out once a week and shoot some he will likely tell you that you need a lot more practice. If you say you go out once a month he may tell you to go home. That would be a shame because his workshops are expensive and hard to get into.

    I’m hoping to convince you that you, and only you, should care how many shots you take.

    Predictor

    So in Jay Maisel’s experience your shooting habits are a predictor of your ability. Frequent photo practice, in his view, helps you become more experienced, quicker to see a good image, and more practiced in the technical aspects of using your gear. This all combines to make you far more capable of recognizing and capturing the best moments and gestures.

    The repetition and the self evaluation that comes with it also makes us more thoughtful. We learn to see more when we practice seeing. Our ability to open up and be receptive to the stimulus around us increases.

    Repetition

    In one sense the constant repetition of taking a lot of pictures frequently builds the equivalent of muscle memory. It is the same way a good athlete does a lot of practice. Besides their intense training a basketball star may spend hours just shooting baskets. A baseball player may spend hours in the batting cage hitting balls over and over. A soccer star may spend hours just kicking the ball around, kicking goals, taking passes.

    Doing this makes them more used to the feeling of the ball or the bat. The pump or the swing of their muscles. The rhythm of the movement. It builds familiarity with the movements they want to do in a game. The motions become routine and automatic.

    I believe a similar effect happens to us in our image making. There is great benefit in being out a lot. Taking lots of pictures, even if we throw most of them away. We are practicing the motions of using our camera, framing, composing, executing images. It becomes a smooth and automatic reaction. The camera controls become instinctive. Our fingers learn to find and use them in the dark, without having to think.

    In addition, lots of repetitions gives us lots of opportunities for failure and evaluation. When the result we get does not match what we visualize we can ask why. This gives us lots of very personalized feedback to help us improve.

    Then when we are taking “serious” pictures, this helps us work smoothly and confidently. We can concentrate more on our creativity and less on the techniques of using the gear. The camera becomes an unconscious extension of our creativity. We are adept at framing great compositions so it flows easily.

    Obsessive

    This may seem fairly obsessive. Good. I hope so. It is and it should be.

    A great athlete or musician, or artist, should be obsessive about their work. It is not a simple 9 to 5 job you can just step away from. It consumes a lot of your thought and time.

    In looking at examples of athletes or musicians I find that good ones may come to a point where they can say “I’ve achieved good proficiency in what I do and some fame and recognition; I can settle back and enjoy the good life.” But the top ones are driven, obsessed. They practice hours every day even if they are considered to be the best. They know that they can improve and they are driven by some internal guide to only compare themselves to their own results, not other people.

    Your mileage may vary.

    I talk a lot about how Jay Maisel does his work. It is because I believe we can learn a lot from him. He is a fantastic artist, an interesting character., and very open about what he does

    But Jay is Jay; you are you; I am me. We cannot and should not just try to imitate another artist, no matter how much we admire them. We each are different. Each one has different vision and responds to different stimulus and motivation.

    I am not trying to be a (slightly) younger Jay Maisel. Nor am I encouraging you to be that. When you find wisdom, though, it pays to study it. A wise mentor usually has something we can learn and adapt for our own life.

    I was reminded of this again recently viewing a class by Jennifer Thorson. She has an interesting class on conceptual fine art photography on CreativeLive. Her work and working style is completely opposed to my thought processes or interests. I would never do the types of work she does. Nevertheless, I learned things from her that I can adapt. Part of my constant practice is to learn from the best.

    Practice, practice, practice

    One of my key learnings from Jay Maisel is to practice, practice, practice. Have your camera with you all the time, as far as you can. Take lots of shots. Experiment. Try new things all the time. Make a lot of mistakes and learn from them. Get so familiar with your camera that you can do most of the settings automatically.

    I try to get out with my camera 4-6 times a week and shoot something each time, usually regardless of the weather. I find that when I have a camera with me, it gives me permission and encouragement to shoot. Has it made me a great artist? Well, that is an evaluation for someone else to make. Just doing these things will not do that by themselves. If you shoot baskets 10 hours a day it will not make you a Michael Jordon. But it helps.

    Try it for a few weeks. Get out a lot and take lots of pictures. Try to build muscle memory. Let me know if it helps!

    “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

  • Improve Your Portfolio

    Improve Your Portfolio

    If you are an artist, you probably have a portfolio. This is simply a collection of your best work. One important thing I have discovered is that when you pull a portfolio together, you are not done. It is not done. Your portfolio selections can probably be improved. The portfolio improvement process is a critical skill to work on.

    Have you had a relative or friend who wanted to show you “a few” pictures of their vacation? You know, they took 1200 pictures and they want to show you every one of them. Eventually your eyes bleed and you want to strangle them.

    Some portfolios are like this. We like almost every one of our images so other people need to see them. Don’t be that one.

    Less is more

    Here was a hard lesson for me to learn: every image you take out of your portfolio makes the collection stronger. On the surface it doesn’t make sense and it hurts a lot to do, but it is true.

    It has been said your portfolio is only as strong as your weakest image. Therefore, every weak image you take out makes the remaining ones stronger overall. If you actually take out the weakest one. Therein lies the hard part.

    How do you take out that image you love or represents a great memory for you or was a once-in-a-lifetime location? You do it brutally and without mercy. Sorry. That’s the way it is.

    The viewers of your portfolio don’t care. They weren’t there with you to share the experience. Any image you show needs to be near perfect technically, compositionally, conceptually. This is representing who you are.

    Portfolio improvement process

    I recently watched a video by Ramit Sethi. He is a well known writer on finance and business. Something he talks about a lot is copy writing. Copy, technically, is any written communication you get from a business. It can be ads or email or brochures or anything else. Ramit is persuasive in showing that great copy is far more effective than weak copy.

    In this valuable video he made 3 points about improving copy, but I was impressed that the idea applies to other things, too. Paraphrasing him, the points were

    1. Know if something is good or bad
    2. Know why it is good or bad
    3. Know how to improve it

    I believe this same process can apply to building a stronger portfolio. It is a model for a vary mature and knowledgeable way to approach improving something.

    Recognize good

    Do we really recognize the good? Without letting our emotions get in the way? Do we have a base of knowledge to compare our work to?

    We can educate ourselves to improve our recognition of good vs. bad. One easy thing is to look at a lot of good examples. Spend time in museums and galleries. This work has been vetted by curators. That doesn’t mean much in reality, but at least you know someone consciously chose the work there.

    Books of images are useful, too. Most contain carefully chosen collections of the artist’s best work. Again, we don’t really know who did the choosing or by what criteria, but if the work is being presented as art it is often quite good.

    Finally, cultivate a collection of artists you admire. Browse their web galleries regularly. They also often have very good blogs. But of the many thousands of photo web sites, probably only a small fraction is worth bookmarking.

    Exercises like this will help build a base of knowledge. It gets us familiar with the look of good work. I can’t recommend that you will get better by looking at bad art.

    Articulate good

    Recognizing good is an excellent start. It probably puts you ahead of most people. But we also need to be able to describe the reason for our evaluation. It is not enough for us, like Justice Stewart to just say “I know it when I see it”.

    There is an old saying that if you want to understand a new subject, explain it to someone else. It helps you understanding it yourself. This works kind of like that. When you can clearly explain to yourself or someone else why an image is good or bad (in your opinion), you have a clear understanding of your judgement.

    Getting to this point is harder. You can build a mental model of what you think certain art critics would say. You might have taken some lessons in art appreciation. If you are very lucky you may even have a good mentor who can coach you and help develop your conscious evaluation.

    Your standards

    Better is to train yourself. Study composition. Know the “rules” of photography. Study technique and use of light. In other words become enough of an expert to have a solid and well reasoned opinion about your craft. And don’t forget that, as you grow, your style becomes more and more different from your peers.

    When you evaluate an image it is from multiple viewpoints. You have to consider what the artist intended. Determining if you have ever seen anything else kind of like it gives a point of comparison. Applying conventional composition norms to it helps to set an evaluation framework. It is tricky, but fair, to consider what you would have done in the same situation.

    But at the base of it all, pretend you are explaining to someone why it is good or bad. Really go through the dialog. Be honest. Don’t skip over the hard parts.

    Improve

    Then there is the improve part. I hope we all are consciously trying to improve our work all the time. If you think you have arrived at the peak and can’t go any higher, you are fooling yourself. As an artist you have to have a lot of confidence but at the same time be humble enough to realize you are a work in progress.

    Ask yourself what could be different, what variations on this could you think of? What part or this image is weak? Can you move your location? Should you wait for better light? Maybe a smaller part of the scene is a better image. Some of these questions may lead to a different way to approach the subject.

    Your portfolio

    These 3 questions from Ramit could lead most of us to becoming better artists. But let me relate it back to improving our portfolio.

    As I am going through my portfolio I need to be brutally honest. For each image in your portfolio ask: is this a great image? If not, it shouldn’t be here. Can I explain why it is good? Clearly? Finally, can I envision a way to improve it and replace it with a stronger image?

    The survivors should be strong images. There is no hard rule of how many images you should have. A number I hear a lot is 20. That seems insane. I have to boil my thousands of great images down to 20? Crazy. Impossible. Have you tried? It is quite a revealing exercise.

    There are some attitudes I have to take when I am doing it. First, I must really believe that taking out a marginal image makes the set stronger. Second, I can’t keep an image in just because I love it. It has to be able to stand on its own. Third, I make myself believe that taking out a favorite image is not like throwing it away. It could be used somewhere else, like if a gallery requests a certain subject that it fits.

    Lastly, I have to understand that the viewers will only see what I show them. They will never see the ones that almost worked. They will not see the ones that were bumped by stronger images. What they do see determines their evaluation of me as an artist. Better to lose some of my favorites if they are not to the level of craftsmanship and creativity I want to portray. I have done it and lived through it.

    A living thing

    Your portfolio is a living thing. It should change as you do better and better work. Go back periodically and test some of your new images against your portfolio. Hopefully you will sometimes reluctantly take out some of the old favorites in favor of the new works.

    This is sad, but it should also be exciting. If you are growing as an artist you new work should be even better than the best of the past. It is a way to see your progress. And your portfolio gets stronger. You are growing.

    To see a snapshot of my current portfolio broken down by several genres, check it out at:

    photos.schlotzcreate.com

  • Keywording

    Keywording

    Keywording is a pretty mundane subject. But I recommend not ignoring it. It is valuable to you and good discipline. I have tried to ignore keywords at times but I have always changed my mind.

    What

    The photo filing software you use probably has provisions for adding keywords to your images. It probably also has ways to add a lot of other meta data, like location or client or your copyright information. Use this other information, too. I use Lightroom Classic for my organization and keywording.

    Keywords are simply arbitrary tags that add words or phrases to help you locate or identify your image later. This is important, the keywords are completely chosen by you and for your use, unless you work for an organization that enforces standardized keywords. I will assume here that that does not apply to you.

    So they are only meant to be useful information for you. They may tag location or subject or color or mood or anything that seems relevant to you. You can add as many keywords to an image as you want. Perhaps there is an upper limit, but I have never found it or read about it. Again, let me emphasize that you decide what they are.

    Why

    Why go to this trouble? Because one of the problems with digital images is that we tend to collect a lot of them. And since they are “hidden” on your computer and not nice physical prints you can flip through, you need extra help finding things. Someday you will want to find a particular image or images of a certain subject or those pictures of a red cardinal in a winter snowstorm you took a few years ago. Keywords are one of the means of locating or grouping your pictures.

    One of the challenges of keywording is to Goldilocks it: not too much, not too little, but just right. How do you know what is just right? That’s the challenge. Partly it has to be sort of backward looking. That is, when you find you can use your keywords to locate the images you want and it did not seem too much trouble to have added them, it may be just right. Sorry, not a really helpful description. The trouble is, your mileage may vary.

    Strategy

    Most photographers eventually determine a strategy for keywording that works for them. I have seen people who do a lot of wildlife photography who tag images with the common and scientific name of their subjects. That is too much work for me. Since I don’t shoot much wildlife I may only tag the occasional one with “elk”, or “deer”, or “pronghorn”. Or a very generic thing like “bird”.

    Works for me. Would not work for some people I know. Choose an approach that is right for your needs.

    There are places on the internet where you can find lists of keywords. I have looked at some of them, but they tend to be too detailed for me. Plus, since I did not create them, I have trouble thinking of the words the author chose. So I make up my own keywords as needed. A quick export of my keywords shows that I have nearly 2200 unique keywords in my main catalog. I am completely sure many people have far more.

    For the most part, I use keywords to identify subjects, attributes of the image, and “housekeeping” information.

    Example

    Let me give a simple example. This is a somewhat randomly chosen image that seemed fairly typical of my keywording.

    Sunset, wide open spaces

    This image has 14 keywords currently. For the subject ones, it is identified as a cabin on the eastern plains of Colorado with interesting clouds. For the attributes that seemed important to me, it is a landscape, it is abandoned, it is made of wood, a sunset image, taken in summer, and showing an expanse of distance.

    The potentially most interesting are what I term housekeeping keywords. I use these to track important information that often has nothing directly to do with the image. An example for this one is that it is copyrighted. Yes, all of my images are copyrighted technically at the moment I take them, but this extra level signifies that the image has been filed and accepted for copyright by the United States Copyright Office. In addition it has keywords indicating the copyright registration number and date of grant. Other example housekeeping tags are that it is in my Select5 group, one of my highest ratings, and it is used in this blog.

    Why do it this way? Because I developed a system over time that works for me and is based on real needs that needed to be solved. I do not claim it is the only way to do things or that it is the best way. It is just the workflow I use. I encourage you to also adapt your tools and process to meet your needs rather than bending your needs to match the tools, or what someone has told you you should do – including me.

    Worth it?

    It is solely up to you to decide if it is worth it to you. It is to me. I often do searches to locate a particular image or a certain type of scene. The more identifying information I have, up to a point, the better. I also use smart collections sometimes to group together all images of a certain criteria. For example, I mentioned using a keyword for my selection level. I have smart collections that will show me, for instance, everything at select level 3 that has not yet been evaluated for possible promotion to level 4. This is a key part of my workflow.

    I always keep in mind what I termed the Goldilock effect. If my keywords are not adding value for me I will modify or abandon the process.

    These are your images and your process. Do what works best for you. But it is good discipline to enforce on yourself. I can say that if you go a long time ignoring something like keywording and decide later you should do it, it is a lot of boring work for a while.

    The tradeoff for me is that keywords are valuable for my work and useful for my processes. I will put in the effort to do it. Taking a little time to think about an image from several aspects like subject and attributes and housekeeping has benefits for me. It is one of the steps that ensures I am curating my valuable assets rather than just accumulating a big bag of pictures.

    Postscript

    A growing trend is software that attempts to analyze your images and automatically generate keywords. One new one I’ve seen is Excire. Another system I have seen described is fotoKeyword Harvester. I’m sure there are more. Lightroom itself agressively tries to get me to let it scan to identify people. It’s little brother, now named just “Lightroom” also automatically tries to keyword images. All this comes with the increasing penetration of so called AI technology.

    I don’t use these tools. As a matter of fact, I don’t trust them. All that I’ve seen will suck your images into “the cloud” for analysis. I have no sure way of knowing what will happen to them then. I am very protective of my rights and possession of my images.

    Yes, I may be a Luddite, but it is not entirely out of ignorance. I am a Software Architect who had done AI work and even developed practical applications based on some of its research. I have some idea of the downsides of using it.

    Besides, as I indicated above, my system is based on a network of keywords I have grown organically over a long time. I am not interested in some software system deciding to re-describe and re-interpret my image data.

    So for the foreseeable future, I will continue doing my keywording manually.

  • JPG vs. Raw

    JPG vs. Raw

    It seems like deciding on jpg vs. raw formats for our images is a problem for some photographers. I’m not sure why. Maybe it is lack of knowledge or maybe because it is sometimes discussed in almost mythological terms. Jpg and raw are just 2 ways of saving our images. Each is good for some things but there are tradeoffs to consider. It is just technology, not magic.

    Image formats

    When you take an image on your digital camera, each manufacturer has their own proprietary magic they do on the bits coming off the sensor. This lets them tune their image to meet their goals. If you shot the same scene with different cameras you would notice subtle differences – slight color balance differences, slight variations is tonal contrast, different handling of shadows and highlights, etc. These are usually small, but they give a camera it’s unique character.

    But we need to consume these pixels in our image processing software. So there needs to be standardized ways of storing the images and reading them in our computer. These are file formats. There are 2 main choices.

    Jpg is an industry standard format. The format is very widely understood and used. All images, once converted to jpg, are compatible.

    What we call raw files are really proprietary file formats created by different camera manufacturers. Image processing software, like Adobe Lightroom, has taken the responsibility to be able to read the files written by virtually all camera manufacturers. For instance, I shoot Nikon, so the images LIghtroom reads and handles have the “.nef” extension. Lightroom knows how to interpret this and convert it to editable pixels.

    The key thing here is that these raw files all contain roughly the same information, but are not directly compatible. Thankfully our software handles the differences gracefully.

    Technical details – jpg

    The term jpg, more precisely “jpeg” is derived from a standard created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. The name jpg is an abbreviated acronym.

    The problem was that digital files are very large, this made them consume lots of disk space back when disks were small. It also used up lots of bandwidth transmitting them back when internet was slow and much more expensive (anyone remember dial up modems?).

    The jpg standard is based on some brilliant insights on human perception to allow encoding image files so they look good but are much smaller. The underlying principle is that humans are more sensitive to variations of tone (luminance) than they are to color (chrominance). The jpg processing reduces the luminance information and greatly reduces the chrominace data to acheive reductions of about 10x typically.

    In general, transforming an image to jpg is a multi step process. It involves a transformation where the luminance and chrominance information is separated. Then the chrominance information is downsampled, or reduced. Then there is a grouping of data into blocks and a process called discrete cosine transform is applied to the data blocks. This transformed information is quantitized and encoded. Finally the data is written out in a defined format as a jpg file. It is not at all necessary to know these details, just that the data in a jpg file is far removed from the original pixels that came from the camera.

    It is a lossy compression technique. Yes, it throws away a lot of data. This is one of the big tradeoff points of jpg. But a fringe benefit is that the image is made to look “nice”. The result is pleasing to most people without further processing

    Technical details – raw

    These files are called “raw” because they contain minimally processed data from the camera sensor. They are absolutely not ready to be viewed or processed. Some people describe it as a digital negative. Conceptually this is pretty good way to help us think about it, but it is not a valid description. The data is not negative and it is not viewable. It might be better to think of it as exposed but unprocessed film.

    To follow this metaphor, a raw image processor like Lightroom “develops” the image and makes it viewable and editable.

    Why raw? It captures and beings into the computer all the data that the camera sensor was able to record. It has the full range of color and tones. Nothing has been eliminated yet.

    In addition, the raw format has not had any lossy compression applied. Nothing is thrown away or reduced. Because of these things an image from a raw file requires manual editing to complete it. Sometimes a lot of editing.

    Tradeoffs

    So jpg is made small as possible and generally nice looking as soon as you see it. You can immediately look at it or send it to someone or post it to your social media. Yes, some information has been intentionally eliminated, but that is not important to most people. If you don’t notice it then it must not matter.

    On the other hand, if you want to make a large print of a jpg you may see noisy patterns that are euphemistically called “artifacts”. This might be mitigated with clever software, but your mileage may vary.

    And there is an editing danger you need to be aware of: every time you save a jpg file it goes through the transform process to reduce data. So every time you edit it and save it you lose information and introduce more artifacts. If you want to edit a jpg always save the edited file in a lossless format, like psd or tif.

    The raw files are usually very large. On my current main camera a typical raw file is 50-70 MBytes. A high quality jpg of the same resolution is around 4-5 MBytes. So, 10 to 1 or greater differential. And the raw files require an investment of time and training and tools to process them into a respectable state.

    But, and this makes up for everything, the raw file preserves every bit of information that we can wring out of the sensor. A modern sensor is marvelous and enables very aggressive processing. The raw format contains the full resolution of the pixels. It is not limited to 8 bit data like jpg. I often do things with the image data that I could not have envisioned when I took the original photo.

    Different needs

    When would you want to use one vs. the other? Well, if I was shooting a wedding I would probably use jpg. Say I come away with 3000 images. I would want to be able to scan through and see good views of all of them so I can quickly pick the 100-200 best to share with the client. If I did my job well the images should not need much editing. I would not have time to process this many raw files.

    Also, if I am shooting snaps of my family that is a time for jpgs. And if I was on vacation and just shooting travel photos for memories that is good jpg territory. I guess if my memory card was nearly full and I didn’t have a spare I might switch to jpg to keep shooting a few more frames. I try to prevent that from happening.

    For me, any other time requires raw files. It is my go-to choice. I know I want to process the images heavily. I am not afraid of the techniques. Given the choice I will always want to retain the maximum information and resolution possible. This given me the flexibility to make massive changes or change my mind and go back to re-process the image for a different look

    I tried to present a very neutral view of the tradeoffs of the 2 formats. I can sympathize that the choice is hard for some people. For me, it is straightforward. Use jpg if I am taking shots of people and I am confident it will need little processing. Otherwise, definitely raw.

    The image with this article is a jpg. It looks fine for this application.