Les Barnett plays a homemade banjo at the Foxfire Museum. From a jpeg original.
There's a long-running debate about whether it's better to shoot RAW or jpegs in your digital camera. I would guess most knowledgeable photographers would counsel you to shoot RAW. Me? I shoot both. But most of my digital pictures that you see will be out-of-the camera jpegs. The RAW files are backups, and I only use them when a scene has an extremely wide range of tones or presents a difficult color-balancing problem. Most digital cameras allow you to shoot both simultaneously.
Slide film was probably the most difficult photographic medium to work with, yet I used it for the majority of my work for 35 years. It required a very precise metering technique, because if it were more than a stop overexposed it was unusable. It was a little more forgiving of underexposure. But I never relied on the built-in camera meters, because they read the light reflected from the subject and could easily be fooled. I almost always used an incident meter, which read the light falling on the subject, which is far more accurate.
However although the meter built into your digital camera is a reflected-light meter, it is far more sophisticated and accurate than those in my old film cameras. The meters in my Fuji cameras are right on the money most of the time, and at worst, are close enough that a simple Photoshop adjustment in Curves will make them just right.
When I'm finished editing my photos I usually delete the RAW files to save space on my hard drive.
Here's how I set up my Fuji cameras to shoot jpegs. Your camera may be slightly different.
Image Quality: F (Fine)
Film Simulation: S (resembles Fuji Astia, my favorite film. This is a matter of personal taste. I prefer my photos to have softer, warmer tones.)
Dynamic Range: 100
White Balance: I usually use Auto
Highlight and Shadow Tones: Both 0
Color: +1
Sharpness: +1
ISO: Varies with situation, but I mostly use ISO 800. The sensors in today's digital cameras are so good there's seldom any advantage in using a lower speed. My files will easily enlarge to 24x36 inches and beyond with excellent sharpness.
The photo above is an excellent example of a straight-out-of-the-camera jpeg. There's good color and a wide range of tones with nothing extreme. Click on it for an enlarged version and you will see that there are no burned-out highlights and that there is detail even in the dark hallway behind the banjo player. The photo was made with a Fuji X-H1 camera and the cheap but vastly underrated Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens.
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Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/ Looking is free, and you might find something you like.
Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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