Wedding - RAW or JPEG?

blo said:

The last wedding I photographed, I took 404 photos - all in RAW.
Storage space wasn't a problem - i have a portable 20GB hard disk
drive to transfer the files to when the CF card is full.

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What will you do when your hard disk fails at a wedding (possibly losing all the images?) Or do you have 2, and create a backup?
--
Tony Collins
[email protected]

Bruce,

That is good point, but I have situations at weddings where I will shoot more than 75 pics and there is still action. What I would prefer is to have either the second 20D loaded and ready to go or my assistant right there to take the full CF card and hand me another one. When you are shooting the formals there is more time, but during the wedding there is not.

Or get a 2GB card.

--
http://www.pbase.com/richo/
'Life is a dance, Love is the music.'

Vance Zachary said:

if you are a novice, and I'll assume you are by the very fact that
you asked this question, you're probably safer shooting RAW. Thus
after the fact you can go back and clean up your mistakes.

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I agree with Vance, If you are new to this thing, stick with RAW. But make sure you have 3-4gb of storage with you. And you back up, back up, back up your files!

Vance Zachary said:

I shoot 95% large Jpg. with excellent results and a more
streamlined workflow. IMO, this is important when dealing with
hundreds of images. You must have your technique together though.
You still can do quite a bit of tweaking after the fact but at the
expense of some loss of image quality.

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My ratio too. I reserve the RAW for formals, controlled portraits, and the bride & grooms stuff (shoes, rings, aras, dress, etc). RAW gives me the best image for enlargements and that extra bit lost in jpg can be handy. Jpg goes to the processional/recessionial and other shots.

Vance Zachary said:

Whether you choose RAW or Jpg is a matter of personal choice and
there are solid arguments for shooting either way.

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Agree.

But in the end, YOU, the photographer, must improve your skills to the point that RAW does NOT become an excuse to save your bad shots. This just means you did not take the time to compose and expose properly. This means you need to learn to compose and expose properly.

Use RAW only because you want to get the best out of the shots, not because you are want it to save you if you made a mistake. In short, make it a point to make your mistakes approach zero percent. Some may think this as arrogant, but our team practices TQM in our shoots and the "get it right the first time" philosophy," though hard to get a zero defect event, has saved us days of work in post processing. Right now, we reject about 10% of our shots as truly "bad" (OOF mostly). In one of our shoots, we shot 1500 with two cameras. That's 150 of truly unsusable shots.

We want to go below this percentage. This means we study why we got those shots bad and improve on our skills. Not all "bad" shots are your fault. Sometimes, the subject moves and you are shooting at 1/8-1/25 sec (w/c we normally do since we also belong to the available light school of shooting) so we know that at times we are risking some shots. It's a good thing that we do a "double tap" or take two shots of important scenes, so we got it saved. Sometimes, if the scene is really very good, we do more than two shots, for insurance.

But our color balance, composition, lighting is basically spot on. Most of our bad shots are the OOF ones w/c, if it can be explained properly, is "forgivable." Of course we could always crank up our ISO, lower the aperture to jack up our shutter speed, but we like living on the edge. So we know why we get a 10% no keeper shots. But when it comes to the important parts of the wedding, we shoot RAW, and we jack up our settings to minimize rejects.

I just did a landscape and architectural shoot 3 days ago. It was my first. It was a good thing my fundamentals was solid. I shot about 120 shots of a difficult garden/outdoor landscape. The lighting was hard (high contrast, changing light due to the clouds and sunlight), lots of detail. I used only jpg confident of my skills and ability to read the histogram. Out of those 120, my rejects (mostly blown out skies) was 20%. I was new to the thing. Bu the indoor shoots were spot on in exposure. The reason for this was I was used to this lighting based on weddings I have shot in the past. So, past skills and learnings is transferable to new type of shoots.

So like what Vance says, use RAW and jpeg selectively. You may have to find your ratio on doing that for yourself. For now, maybe stick with RAW + jpeg medium/or large. You can study the results of your jpg so that you will know where you did wrong, but have the RAW to save you. Do a post wedding review of your shots and do a hard critique on the basics (exposure, composition, lighting, color balance, focus, etc). In time you will get better. Focus on the basics, get it right and solid and you will do fine.

And like Vance says, develop a good/smooth workflow. That helps too. Immensely if I may say so too. You save literally days if your technique and workflow is good.

Good luck!

Vance Zachary said:

--
Vance Zachary
http://www.pbase.com/photoworkszach
http://www.photoworksbyzachary.com

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--
---------------------

• Caterpillar

'Always in the process of changing, growing, and transforming.'

i use film. that never fails.

Tony Collins said:

blo wrote:
What will you do when your hard disk fails at a wedding (possibly
losing all the images?) Or do you have 2, and create a backup?
--
Tony Collins
[email protected]

Click to expand...

Thank you all for all of your recommendations and tips! I purchased a 2GB and 4GB Kingston Elite pro cards the other day. I also purchased a Smartdisk Flashtrax to backup my data on. I feel pretty confident that I have the storage covered.

RichO said:

Bruce,
That is good point, but I have situations at weddings where I will
shoot more than 75 pics and there is still action. What I would
prefer is to have either the second 20D loaded and ready to go or
my assistant right there to take the full CF card and hand me
another one. When you are shooting the formals there is more time,
but during the wedding there is not.

Or get a 2GB card.

--
http://www.pbase.com/richo/
'Life is a dance, Love is the music.'

Click to expand...

I shot one last Saturday and shot the whole wedding with both. If you have the card space then there is no decision.

furmanphoto said:

Have my new 20d and I am shooting a wedding next weekend, should I
shoot in RAW or JPEG? I will have over 300-400 shots, and
processing them in all RAW format seems like a lot of work, but if
that is the way it is supposed to be done, then so be it. What do
you think?

Click to expand...

--
Tom

furmanphoto said:

Thank you all for all of your recommendations and tips! I
purchased a 2GB and 4GB Kingston Elite pro cards the other day. I
also purchased a Smartdisk Flashtrax to backup my data on. I feel
pretty confident that I have the storage covered.

Click to expand...

Good choices.

Please post us the results of your endeavors! Tell us how it went. I always love to hear weddign war stories!

--
---------------------

• Caterpillar

'Always in the process of changing, growing, and transforming.'

furmanphoto said:

Have my new 20d and I am shooting a wedding next weekend, should I
shoot in RAW or JPEG? I will have over 300-400 shots, and
processing them in all RAW format seems like a lot of work, but if
that is the way it is supposed to be done, then so be it. What do
you think?

Click to expand...

No substitute for RAW when you're wanting the very best and your reputation is on the line. Actually, if you use C1 Pro, JPG is much more work.

--
BryanS