Shutterfinger

There Is Honor In Shooting JPEGs

Can you tell whether this was originally shot raw or as a JPEG? Do you care? One thing is for sure: Whatever its origins, it will have to be a JPEG to be uploaded to the web.

The party line among the digital cognoscenti these days is that you're not "serious" about photography unless you shoot raw. JPEGs are supposedly only for the point-and-shoot crowd--people who lack either the knowledge or the ability to control how their images are output.

Do not listen to these people. If your camera does a good job of producing JPEGs--and most do--then why go to the added time and expense* of working with raw files simply to document your everyday photos? Shoot in JPEG mode, file and print your photos, and be happy.

The one catch with JPEGs is the image is "baked in." You don't have much leeway for changing things like exposure or color balance without  noticeably degrading  the image quality. When you're shooting in JPEG mode you therefore have to be careful not to overexpose the highlight. You should also remember to adjust the color balance setting to suit the lighting conditions.

In challenging or once-in-lifetime situations you can always set the camera to raw or raw+JPEG, but for the majority of your photos you can shoot happily in JPEG mode and nobody--including the digital cognoscenti--will be the wiser.

*By "expense" I'm referring to the fact that raw files are much larger than JPEGs and therefore require higher capacity memory cards, more hard drive space, and more sophisticated photo editing software.

An Economic Argument in Favor of Color

My good buddy, Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer blog, recently wrote a post on--and I'm oversimplifying here--what a shame it is that more of today's digital photographers don't print their work in black and white. When I use the word "print" I'm referring to the screen as well as a sheet of paper. Mike and I see eye-to-eye on most things photographic, but on this subject I must say that he is woefully behind the times.

Seriously now, why would anyone buy a digital camera--a machine that shoots natively in color--photograph a subject which is also in color, and then strip all the color out? Because that's what artistic photographers in "the good old days" used to do? Let's not forget that in the old days you had to buy and process film, black and white film was less expensive than color, and that artists tended to be impecunious (i.e. broke). Do you think guys like Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White shot in black and white because they wanted to? Hell no! They shot in black and white because it was all they could afford. Commercial photographers, the ones who made the big bucks, shot color and passed the expense on to their clients. Sure a few shot black and white, but that was only for the sake of maintaining their street-cred as "artists."

These days, shooting color costs the same as black and white and sometimes less. (Ever price an inkjet printer capable of making true neutral-tone b&w prints? If so, you know what I mean.) Since you're getting color essentially for free, why not take full advantage of it? The color advantage only increases if you own a copy of Adobe Photoshop. Whatever is wrong with a photo can be removed or subdued. Whatever is great can be enhanced, often by moving a few simple sliders as far as they will go. If the whole idea is to get noticed and praised then, why show restraint? I say go for it.

Did the original scene look like this? Sure, after I pumped up the color saturation and vibrancy in Photoshop. One could argue that the exaggerated colors are more carnival-like and therefore appropriate to the subject.


Here's the same image converted into black and white. Zzzzzz.

The examples I've provided above should help to illustrate my point. Some of you may prefer the black and white version, but keep in mind that it exits only because I was willing to take the time to strip the color and adjust the curves. The color version took a lot less time and delivers more bang for the buck--and that's really what it's all about, isn't it?

(By the way, for those of you who have read this far and are wondering whether I'm being ironic, the answer is yes.)

Scan versus Scan

One of your options when you have film developed at a retail mini-lab is to have it scanned and burned to a CD. This is undeniably convenient, especially if you don't have a scanner of your own. The quality of the scans is often better than you might think, but a lot depends on who's doing them.

How can you tell if a scan is of reasonably good quality? Aside from the quality of any accompanying prints, take a close look at the scans on your monitor to make sure there are no film scratches, dust, or excessive grain. If you've got an image browser or pixel editing program with a histogram feature, use it to see whether there's clipping in the highlights or shadows.

In general,  the less tweaking you have to do, the better the scan. This is important because mini-lab scans are almost always in JPEG format, so any edits and re-saves you do will erode the image data.

In case you're wondering just how good a mini-lab scan can be, here are two samples. One was done was done at a local camera shop, the other on my Nikon Coolscan V film scanner. Can you tell which is which?

Scan A

Scan B

Is This Progress?

It amazes me what some paper distributors are charging for "fine art" ink jet papers. Harman Gloss FB, for example, sells for around $28.00 for 15 sheets of 8.5 x 11" paper. This works out to about $1.87 per sheet. In contrast, 25 sheets of 8 x 10" Ilford Multigrade IV Fiber-based can be had for $24.00, which works out to $0.96 per sheet. The reason I compared these two brands is because a print on Harmon Gloss FB is supposed to look the most like a print on an air-dried silver-based glossy paper like Multigrade IV FB. From all accounts, Harmon Gloss FB is a wonderful paper, but why should it cost almost twice as much per sheet as one that's actually coated with silver? Keep in mind that your actual cost per print is even higher once you add the price of ink. Silver-based images are created with light, which is free. Ink jet inks can have an effective price of almost $7000 per gallon! And you thought gasoline was expensive...

The Digital Challenge

The main difference between learning photography in the film era (which isn’t over, by the way) and now in the digital era is that with film and chemical processing, you had the sense that you were trying to learn a large but defined body of knowledge. With digital photography, the body of knowledge is constantly changing and expanding, along with the tools and techniques. The good news is that there's overlap. The fundamentals are the same no matter what medium you embrace.

For some photographers this is exciting. In exchange for a constantly receding horizon of knowledge, digital imaging has allowed more control over every aspect of image making than ever before. For others, the feeling of never being able to completely grasp what’s going on, much less keep up, is daunting and perhaps even discouraging.

I happen to fall somewhere in the middle. I like having more control than before, but I'm annoyed that things that used to be so simple are now more complicated and expensive than before. As this blog develops over time, I plan to explore what we’ve gained, what we’ve lost, and what was never worth much to begin with.