Sick as a Dog
I spent this past weekend sick as a dog. I figure I picked up something during my routine visit to the doctor. I seem to get a cold or something every time I go in there anymore. This thing this weekend was a lot worse than a cold. I am beginning to think I should have “lived fast, and died young”.
I once again had problems with eBayers. The battery grip I ordered was missing one of the springs in the battery compartment. They were nice enough, said they would look and see if they had one. The then dummied up on me, did not respond to emails, etc. I filed a dispute with PayPal, and they immediately responded to that. They claimed their junk mail deleted my emails. Said they had a spring, and would send it as soon as I closed the dispute. ??? Wait a minute! Fool me once, OK. But I am not going to be a sucker twice. I responded that I would close the dispute as soon as I get the spring. All this hassle over a 10¢ part. Anyway, they said they had mailed it, but it has not arrived yet. Sigh.
A week ago last Saturday, it was fairly nice out and I went uptown and shot a bunch of photos with the new camera (Olympus e420, for those who have just come in) on auto. I had it set to save a raw file and a VGA (640×480) size jpeg. All of the raw files were usable, most of the jpegs were rather under exposed. A couple of examples:
First the jpeg as it came out of the camera.
And then the raw, default ACR settings, downsize to 640×480, converted to 8 bits, and saved for the web.
So, for the people who ask why I shoot raw, that is the reason.
Oh, if I had been doing my usual thing the jpegs would have no doubt came out better. My usual thing is to shoot manually, metering with my incident light meters. In fact, the next day I went out to the Greenway Trail Park and shot some snow shots that way. A couple of the jpegs had burnt out highlights, bad technique on my part, while the raw files were OK.
The problem, for those who do not know, in both cases is that what you see in the jpeg is what you get, any data that was lost was permanently gone, while with the raw files everything that was captured is still there (as long as you do not overwrite the file with an edited version). For example the default conversion burns out the highlights like on the jpeg’s, you can go in and change the settings and there are your highlights.
I have to go check at the Post Office and see if that spring has arrived. So long until next time.