MWGL Photography thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
jaxn slim said:
I just spent about a day hanging out in Reno and Lake Tahoe. Unfortunately it has rained pretty much the whole fucking time. But I did get this shot.

Tahoe-1.jpg


And I've been doing a lot of photo work recently of children and families. I'm really happy with it, but I'm not sharing it with you skeevy bastards.
Click to expand...

Rain???? It's raining in NorCal????

I need to travel more often

Nice shot
 
Rick 381 said:
With all the awesome photos here I feel not worthy. I have been hitting the state parks heavy lately and although my little Fuji Finepix works fine I decided to move up a bit. So tonight I ordered a Nikon D3300 with a Nikkor 18-55, and a Nikkor 55-200. Not exactly earth shaking gear I know but good enough to get me to a point where I decide if I need to by better stuff or not. I also downloaded Picassa the other day and have been playing with that a bit. Anything better than Picassa at that price(free)?
Click to expand...

Sounds like my setup.

I started shooting jpeg and just importing the pictures into Picasa and using it to do basic corrections and cropping. I got decent results, but nothing really eye popping.

Lately, I've been shooting raw and using an open source program called Raw Therapee to do color correction and sharpening. From Raw Therapee, I export jpeg files which I import into picasa. It is a lot more work, and so far, I can't say the results are any better than just shooting jpegs and importing directly into picasa.
 
Rick 381 said:
With all the awesome photos here I feel not worthy. I have been hitting the state parks heavy lately and although my little Fuji Finepix works fine I decided to move up a bit. So tonight I ordered a Nikon D3300 with a Nikkor 18-55, and a Nikkor 55-200. Not exactly earth shaking gear I know but good enough to get me to a point where I decide if I need to by better stuff or not. I also downloaded Picassa the other day and have been playing with that a bit. Anything better than Picassa at that price(free)?
Click to expand...

I'd like to offer my view on this.

First of all, every one of us sucked at one point. Further, each one of us continues to take sucky photos every time. It's just what happens. But we're all capable of taking good, or even great ones. Hopefully, we just become more consistent in taking good or great ones as we get better and know our equipment better.

I have seen stunning photos taken with an iPhone, so a Nikon D3300 is more than capable of taking a seriously GREAT photo. Sure, it's cheap. Sure, you can get better cameras.

But stop and think about this. There were stunning photos taken five or ten years ago, weren't there? Of course there were. Your camera blows the doors off many of those cameras from 5-10 years ago - including professional cameras.

The Nikon D3300 is perfectly capable of doing mind-blowing, National Geographic worthy "Holy crap, that is totally the sh*t" sort of images. Seriously.

See the photo I took of the lunar eclipse above? It's not a great photo - it was hazy - but it doesn't suck. That was taken with a camera that has lower specs than your D3300.

See this photo below? This was taken with a D7000, which has lower specs (lower ISO capability, less pixels) than your camera. It won Summer Photo of the Year in the Los Angeles Times. And again, with a noticeably less advanced camera than what you just purchased.

startrails-tronapinnacles3-50min-30sf28iso400.jpg

~~~~
GIMP is good, powerful, and free, but I can't stand the interface, although I am told that they have a Photoshop-like interface. I found out illogical and clumsy, but maybe it's better now. I'm sure there's others out there as well.
 
GomezAddams said:
Sounds like my setup.

I started shooting jpeg and just importing the pictures into Picasa and using it to do basic corrections and cropping. I got decent results, but nothing really eye popping.

Lately, I've been shooting raw and using an open source program called Raw Therapee to do color correction and sharpening. From Raw Therapee, I export jpeg files which I import into picasa. It is a lot more work, and so far, I can't say the results are any better than just shooting jpegs and importing directly into picasa.
Click to expand...

The advantage of shooting RAW is...well, there's a lot of advantages.

You can recover lost details in shadows more effectively.

You are not stuck with the decisions you and your camera made at the time...you can adjust white balance, re-sharpen, selectively sharpen, etc., for example

You may learn to process your photos better as you go along and go back to your RAW file.

Your RAW file is your negative. When you choose to either throw away or never use your RAW file, you are basically throwing away your negative.

If you are serious about photography, you can choose to use the RAW. If they are more quick shots and you are not wearing your photographers' hat, shooting JPG is probably better. Shooting in RAW is not always something you need to do, but for some things, it really is better, if only for flexibility and ultimately, the best image quality.

I export my RAW files to 16-bit TIFF files and then process from there.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Tig
Not every photo I take benefits that much from being taken in raw, but when I need it, I'm really glad that I have it.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-T217A using Tapatalk
 
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that shooting raw isn't a good thing. I have been able to save several photos with poor lighting by working with the raw images. I was just trying to point out that shooting raw, then manual post processing is a lot more work and often doesn't yield any tangible improvements for me.

I'm sure once a person masters whatever tool they use to post process the raw images, the resulting images will be better than the camera's automatic processing. But picasa is SO enticing for the lazy. Import, drag a frame to crop, and done.
 
I have got a D3200 and two of the cheapo kit lenses last xmas (still taking shite photos :) ) so it's interesting to read the last few posts. I decided that as memory cards etc are so cheap now to set the camera to take both RAW and jpg so I don't need to faff about with anything if I'm just taking some family snaps and have the raw for anything good I take. Which, admittedly, has been very little
 
Storage is cheap, so I almost always shoot RAW.

But of course, some of the advantages RAW may not matter to some, and it does add an extra layer of complexity because you do have to process the RAW file to TIFF or JPG to share it.
 
GomezAddams said:
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that shooting raw isn't a good thing. I have been able to save several photos with poor lighting by working with the raw images. I was just trying to point out that shooting raw, then manual post processing is a lot more work and often doesn't yield any tangible improvements for me.

I'm sure once a person masters whatever tool they use to post process the raw images, the resulting images will be better than the camera's automatic processing. But picasa is SO enticing for the lazy. Import, drag a frame to crop, and done.
Click to expand...

I can see where you're coming from. But if you were to use a tool like Adobe Lightroom, it's not that many more steps to process an image like these (that I could not have gotten without shooting in RAW):

Utah-1.jpg


Utah-2.jpg


I basically just copied and pasted my edits from some images I had edited previously.
1. Import
2. Copy
3. Paste
4. Profit
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top