RAW vs. JPEG.

At another great session at Michael’s Camera Store a few weeks back where the topic was RAW vs. JPEG. JPEG is the most common photo format, and the one I’ve used most but I was always a little perplexed by the RAW format. I knew that it was uncompressed and technically “better” than the compressed JPEG format but apart from that, knew little else.

Now, I’m not even going to begin a feeble technical explanation here. I’m the wrong person to explain it. I understand it in “my head” but it will sound like gibberish if I try to explain it, so I won’t.

I will say however, that the differences are substantial enough to make oneself aware of the RAW format and learn what it can do for you as a photographer to enhance and improve photos. This was demonstrated during the presentation in several ways. Essentially, with the right software, you have far more flexibility in manipulating the image in RAW and improving. it.

YouTube is a good place to start. You’ll benefit from a visual explanation. You need to SEE the differences, so seek out visual demonstrations.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Understanding+RAW+format

For some reason, I always thought RAW images were massive files and would just gobble up my disk space. The Michael’s team put that thinking into perspective with these two slides

 

I’m most familiar with Canon cameras and the slides below show the menus to explore and choose the RAW format.

 

Different brands have different RAW extensions (below)

Two pieces of software were mentioned that are worth pursuing. Google both.

1. Adobe Lightroom (confusingly called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) is similar to the full Adobe Photoshop but looked easier to use, more intuitive but still quite powerful.
2. FastStone Viewer – This is freeware, and even if you have an image editor, this is still worthwhile installing.  You can tell it was created with photographers in mind as it has some great “zoom into image” and “comparison” features.

I’ve got a lot to explore after this session and I hope to post some of my experiments here.

 

 

 

A lecture in LIFE (…magazine that is)

For many years now, Michael’s Camera Store in Melbourne have been holding a wonderful free lunchtime session on different aspects of photography, with sessions covering the artistic, the historical and the technical. I’d go to it more often but you have to be in the city and it has to be your lunch hour if you’re a worker. Nevertheless, I get to them whenever I can and on this occasion the topic was Life Magazine, that extraordinary pictorial magazine that dominated newsstands for a good part of the 20th century, pioneering photo-journalism for print media.

The lecture explored the work of some of the more prominent Life photographers and it was great to see actual names put to some of those famous photos.

Plenty of names to Google on these lists.

What I didn’t realise was that Life continues on the internet and its public archive is still curated via Time Magazine

http://time.com/photography/life/

I could spend a good part of the weekend looking through this. It just draws you into the past. Interesting curation in that it doesn’t have the stodginess of an archive and material is presented in a modern Buzzfeed headline kinda way.

It allows you to sign up for regular updates and has the usual social media feeds.

You don’t seem to be able to search the archive though which is disappointing. You can search the Time site but that’s different. You get Life results but they’re mixed up with Time results. Best results were in this search format-> “Marilyn+Monroe” but still a lot of wide results. I wonder if you get advanced search features when you become a Time subscriber/member as part of their Unlimited Access offer?

 

You can find out more about Life Magazine here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(magazine)

It has useful hotlinks to many of it’s photographers and other contributors.

Michael’s Camera Store in Elizabeth Street Melbourne can be found here

https://michaels.com.au/

And upcoming Lunchtime Seminars can be found here.

https://michaels.com.au/pages/free-lunchtime-seminars

 

Skills Update: ClickView Administration

ClickView is a educational video library and interactive platform for Schools. It contains exclusive video content and includes basic video production tools, as well as a range of other features for teachers. I’m the ClickView Administrator at my school which involves acquiring, co-ordinating and promoting the educational content. To do this efficiently, I’m currently undertaking a series of Webinars organised by ClickView on various aspects of the system.

ClickView TV – Mon. 2nd July (completed)
ClickView Playlists – Mon. 30th July, 3:30PM (AEST)
ClickView Administration – Mon. 20th August, 3:30PM (AEST)
Teacher-Created Content with ClickView – Mon. 3rd September, 3:30PM (AEST)
Copyright and ClickView – Mon. 22nd October, 3:30PM (AEST)

More about ClickView here:

https://www.clickview.com.au/