{"id":132,"date":"2008-06-03T05:27:27","date_gmt":"2008-06-03T10:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetneil.com\/tangents\/?p=168"},"modified":"2018-01-03T23:33:32","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T03:33:32","slug":"a-raw-element-of-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/a-raw-element-of-style\/","title":{"rendered":"a raw element of style"},"content":{"rendered":"

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During the portrait sessions with my couples, I try to maintain a fluid style of photographing them.\u00a0 Instead of rigidly posing I try to direct only a little, adjusting my position and my composition.\u00a0 I really want as natural looking and flattering portraits as\u00a0I can, while getting a variety of images.\u00a0 For these reasons I move around a lot while shooting … and I\u00a0often try to get some lens flare on purpose<\/a>.\u00a0 I love the way the image warms up and the flare creates pools of light within the image.<\/p>\n

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This is an unpredictable effect,\u00a0but\u00a0when it works, I feel that the flare adds something to the mood of the image – perhaps an image that is more romantic because it is drenched in light.<\/p>\n

I shoot in manual exposure mode since I don’t want my composition to affect my exposure and because I want as fast and efficient a workflow as possible.\u00a0 But then I sometimes\u00a0get a few frames that blow out completely because of the amount of flare …<\/p>\n

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If I had shot this\u00a0in JPG, there wouldn’t be much there to work with.\u00a0 But since I only shoot in the RAW format, I’m more often than not, able to pull back something from that kind of image and get something that works and really looks good.<\/p>\n

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As much I believe that an approach to \u2018get it right in camera\u2019 is without a doubt the best way approach, much of photography done outside of the studio is under less than perfectly controlled situations. And there is simply no photographer good enough to be able to set the exact exposure, correct white balance, and proper contrast and saturation while busy shooting in a situation where the light and conditions change while shooting.\u00a0 So this already presupposes that to get something more from the out-of-camera image, that post-processing of some kind will be needed, it just makes more sense to shoot in the RAW format.<\/p>\n

In addition to exposure adjustments, and white balance and contrast and saturation, other parameters such as sharpening, local contrast, black point and brightness can be adjusted at will with a RAW file.<\/p>\n

Another way to look at it is that\u00a0with the RAW format, your worst case scenario is that you’d have an image which looks like your JPG that you would’ve had.<\/p>\n

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\n.<\/span><\/p>\n

This brings me to a related topic – the implied insult that I’ve seen a number of times on the forums that if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn’t need to shoot in RAW format.\u00a0 Simply get it right in camera .. all the time.\u00a0 That may work for controlled environments, but I photograph in an uncontrolled environment.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example.\u00a0 Even though I had my exposure and WB nailed during the actual photographing of the wedding ceremony, when the couple kissed at the end, quite a few of the guests took photos at the same time.\u00a0 Someone else’s flash blew out my photo by more than a stop.<\/p>\n

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In this case it might be fixable in a JPG image without being really noticeable, but who cares?\u00a0 It is so much easier doing this as part of a normal raw workflow – merely dragging the Exposure slider down until\u00a0the image\u00a0looked good.<\/p>\n

I also wanted to\u00a0use this image here as only one example of being able to give my clients an optimal image without breaking a sweat because something was out of my control at the time.<\/p>\n

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\n.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a large way, my choice of workflow heavily affects my shooting style.\u00a0 It’s as simple and broad a statement that shooting in RAW frees me up to concentrate on the actual moment of taking\u00a0any photograph.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the portrait sessions with my couples, I try to maintain a fluid style of photographing them.\u00a0 Instead of rigidly posing I try to direct only a little, adjusting my position and my composition.\u00a0 I really want as natural looking and flattering portraits as\u00a0I can, while getting a variety of images.\u00a0 For these reasons I Read more inside…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,42,1],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[4496,2870,1310,3880,9118,9110,5256,1337,9114,2238,2561,1810,9106,4106,9135,9108,9104,1556,2090,7647],"class_list":{"0":"post-132","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-digital-imaging","8":"category-technique","9":"category-uncategorized","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32878,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/32878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neilvn.com\/tangents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}