Friday, Saturday and Sunday were major photographic days. We booked an intense workshop with a noted photographer, Mark Tomaras, a friend of daughter #1 and 1A. In fact he was their wedding photographer. Mark is a real pro. He's from Chicago originally where he met #1 but has lived all over the world. He is currently residing in Porto where is wife originated.
Mark outlined for us an full program where we would look over all aspects of our equipment in one session plus review various aspects of using light and composition. Then we had a second day of a four hour walking around and shooting session. Followed by a third session where we would look at what we shot and get into the post-production process.
For Wife, much of this was a review of things she had learned over the years. For me much was new. In particular, Mark wanted me to shoot in Raw. This is something Wife has told me for years as well. I am sure you are all familiar with this, but I was only vaguely. JPEG, the format that most people shoot, is an image where the camera essentially chooses many decisions about how light is captured. So when you go to post-production, there is only so much you can do. But when you shoot in Raw, the information is just as it is captured without the camera making any judgments. So you can do much more with it. Real photographers only shoot in Raw. BUT, there is a need for much more capability in you post-production software to deal with Raw.
Without going into too many gory details, we can call this three days a 'learning experience'. I did learn a lot. But it wasn't necessarily fun. This is no critique of Mark, who is an excellent teacher, and fun person to be with. It was more of my confronting limitations of my own abilities and my own desires as far as how far I want to go down the photographic rabbit hole. Much of the time during the shoot and post-production section, I felt completely lost.
When we were all done, I decided I needed to confront what I had shot. Then I ran into another frustration. The tools I have for getting images off my camera onto my computer evidently are not happy about working in Raw. I kept having the downloading process crash. And I couldn't see the images where I normally do to weed out the ones prior to editing. It was very annoying. I finally got them downloaded through a laborious one-at-a-time process. Looking at them quickly, I was surprised that I had many more good shots than I would have imagined given how overwhelmed I felt.
On Sunday, we went out again by ourselves. I decided I would shoot in Raw again. I had better luck getting the images off but there were still crashing problems. Nor could I view them as a slide show to do a quick edit. And I have no idea once I do post-production how to copy them as JPEG so I can get them uploaded to the blog. So I am not sure if any of these will make it here.
Today we went out for final sightseeing. I decided to go back to the old mode of JPEG image taking. I had no problems downloading them and I will get a post up in the next day or so on them. But I am still wondering how much I want to do to get up the Raw photography curve. Maybe when we do our trip in the fall and have a couple of months in one place, I will give it a good try.
2 comments:
I can sympathize that there are some hobbies where you want to do the very best you can, and some where you just want to do enough and have fun.
Cooking is probably the former for me, and sewing and gardening are the latter.
I'm curious to hear how you think back on this as time passes - what sticks and what was extraneous.
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