JPG versus RAW

I wanted to take a photo for the Flickr D40/60 Challenge group I belong to. The challenge topic was Silohettes', seeing nothing of interest around the home place I decided to run up the road to my grandmothers farm. It was a very overcast day which should make silhouetting very easy but I kind of wanted some blue sky.

I walked into the old tobacco barn thinking it might make a neat silhouette shot from the inside. After taking a few shots and looking at the results in camera I decided that they just didn't look good. It hit me that this would be a good opportunity to get some shots to do some new RAW versus JPG comparisons.

I used to used to shoot RAW a lot since reading about so many saying how much better RAW is. I got tired of spending so much time messing with RAW data and finding my printed RAW photos look no better than JPGs. The software developer in me started to say why do I not see any difference in prints.

I started looking passed everyone saying 'RAW is great' and 'all of the pros use i' wondering just why I don't see any difference. Everyone is saying that RAW has so much more data, 12 bit versus 8 and that you can fix badly exposed shots. After googling around for quite a while and reading a lot of technical articles I concluded that RAW does nothing for you and it is probably mostly driven by marketing and peoples lack of knowledge. I went back to shooting JPG and have never looked back.

In a nutshell I discovered that 8 bits can represent more shades of each color than we can actually see, all printers that I may ever have my work printed on are 8 bit, Nikons RAW data format is proprietary meaning that everyone but Nikon has to guess at how to decode it, the RAW data format changes with each camera version and 20 years from now we may even have no way to view the data, all RAW files need processing (basically converted to JPG) to see or print, operating systems need third party software just to view.

Anyway, below is my post processed out of camera JPG from my D40 with all in camera processing functions set to manual and a RAW. Above is the out of camera JPG with no post processing down sized by Irfanview. Camera was in manual exposure set the same for both shots and it's obvious I didn't use a tripod.

I didn't spend more than 30 minutes or so on both shots, I used CS3 camera RAW on both. Which is the JPG and which is the RAW?

Polarized City

Louisville - No Polarizer 8-8-8
Originally uploaded by mmikee

I went out on a nice clear evening last week to see how the setting sun might be reflecting off the buildings of downtown Louisville, KY this time of year. There were no sun reflections but while there with camera in hand I thought I would take a few shots. I liked the way the clouds were hanging on the east side of the buildings.

I mounted the D40 on the tripod with the 18-200VR attached. I took a few shots and then wanted to add a polarizer to deepen the blue sky, since the sun was to my right I thought I would get lots of blue.

Louisville - with Polarizer 8-8-8
Originally uploaded by mmikee

I was really quite surprised when I got home and saw the actual differences between these 2 shots. Usually the polarized shot is way better than the non polarized, here I am not sure which I like better.

Can you tell which photo is polarized? Which do you like better?

Wide Angle Lens Polarizer Thickness

A question came up in the Sigma 10-20 group about circular polarizer filter (CPL) thicknesses and there vignetting effects. Since I have (was told I needed the thin one) for this lens and I had just recently purchased the same 77mm CPL in normal thickness I thought I would do a quick test.

Below are 3 photos I took with no CPL, thin one and thick one. While not a great consistent background, shooting at 10mm requires a lot of scene, it was hard to find anything better this evening. I might retake some photos on a clearer day when I can get into a more open area.

Sorry, I didn't drag out the tripod. Exposure for the CPL shots was set to the same as the non CPL shot. I let you judge for yourself the results but it appears thick CPLs are just fine.

I'm still figuring out this blog stuff so please pardon my ignorance on posting photos in the blog.


No polarizer


100$+ Tiffen Thin Polarizer



29$ Sunpak Thick Polarizer

Moving the Blog

Ok, so I had a blogger account I have not kept up with and had it setup for pre shotsbymike.com, it was pointing to mikeschellenberger.com I wanted to keep the site as is but just make it belong to shotsbymike.

Once I remembered the login for the old account I had to add my new blogger account as admin to the old then remove the old account from admin. Not to bad with blogger help just had to log out and back in to both accounts a number of times.

Next I needed to remove the old blog.mikeschellenberger.com URL redirect to blog.shotsbymike.com. Went to my mikeschellenberger.com host account and removed the CNAME entry then added a new CNAME entry to shotsbymike.com. My hosting site, WebHost4Life, says it takes an hour for the CNAME to take effect.

I am writing this working on killing an hour and hopefully, shortly, my blog will be at blog.shotsbymike.com

Now I must go and request the fix for my Sirius radio. Since the Sirius XM merger, Sirius decided to lower the FM output power of my receiver to be within FCC specs. For 2 years they have been transmitting to much power, wondered why it was always so hot, the fix now makes the signal to my car radio noisy to unusable sometimes.