This afternoon I caught a bus out to Fox House and walked down through the Longshaw Estate.
Drifts of snow amongst the gritstone boulders made Carl Wark and Higger Tor look very imposing. For a while it seemed like the sun might break through the overcast sky, but the stiff northerly wind soon brought heavy clouds and showers of sleet.
The plan was to spend time taking photographs in Padley Gorge, one of my favourite parts of the Peak District National Park. Dull conditions are ideal for long-exposures of moving water and Burbage Brook offers ample opportunities for dramatic shots as it tumbles through the steep, boulder-strewn gorge.
Unfortunately the cold and showery conditions conspired to make the task somewhat trickier than usual. After a couple of hours my fingers were so numb that I gave up and headed for home. I managed to get a few decent shots, but I had to discard several others due to water droplets on the lens.
One reason I wanted to get out and take some pics today, despite the weather, was that I'm trying to get to grips with the RAW format.
RAW is apparently "considered essential by professional and serious photographers". Whilst I'm not a pro, I do consider myself to be 'serious' about photography. However, I remain unconvinced about the advantages of shooting in the RAW format. For a start, the files gobble up so much space on your memory cards and hard disk. The other big draw back is the lack of EXIF data, which I find essential for cataloguing my pictures (see next post).
I'm really not sure that RAW is worth the effort.
If a picture is intended for publication I try to take in TIFF, but that takes a lot of space in the camera. One way around it is to take it in the RAW format and then save it as TIFF on a hard drive or a CD. RAW files are always smaller than TIFF files.
I do a lot of picture taking indoors using fluorescent lights. I have noticed that white balance correction on RAW files gives better results than color correction on JPEG or TIFF files.
Posted by: Aydin | Wednesday, 01 March 2006 at 03:59 PM
Here are some tests of white balance correction using RAW files:
http://snailstales.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-like-my-sponge-raw.html
Posted by: Aydin | Thursday, 02 March 2006 at 01:47 PM