How about Travel and Photography?

I initially said that the purpose of this blog was to document my travels. My travels are all about photography and my photography is all about my travels. They are so intertwined--so maybe this blog can document my travel to better photography! I'm taking a big step--starting with this Nashville trip (7 more days--not that I'm counting). I have decided to start shooting RAW. I've been so afraid of it for so long. It requires more skill in the photoshop arena (I still barely understand a tiny bit of it) but it sounds like it decreases the need to be able to shoot SOOC (straight out of the camera) well. I'm on the fence and old school. I STILL view photoshop editing as "cheating". To me, getting color, clarity, light source, capture settings and composition all at the same time in the same photo are THE skills a photographer has to learn. If these can be perfected in the post processing--are you a good photographer or a good editor? If you can boost color, correct exposure, change composition, remove things that were there and add things that weren't there when you get to the computer--what did you actually do as the one behind the camera? Give any monkey a camera but put a ps pro on the photos and it's brilliant? I dunno.......

But I digress. I've been afraid of RAW because it has been presented as the way pro photographers shoot~ you know, elitist. The files are sooooo much bigger than JPeg because they are not compressed. It is not an image file but a read only file. It loses no data when manipulated. After all changes, than it is converted to a JPeg or TIFF. It's been touted as THE BEST for correcting all mistakes prior to saving your photos. This sounds more like training wheels than a pro's mode. But. I will try it. I may get better looking photos. It will leave a bad taste in my mouth--but as a perfectionist, I probably won't be able to walk away from it if the results make me "look" like a better photographer.

I downloaded a trial of Adobe Lightroom. The members of the photography board that I frequent seem to have settled on this software as the preferred method of processing RAW photos. It's only a 30 day trial and I actually hope that I don't like it. To purchase it is $299. Granted, that is less than CS2 and definitely less than CS3! I'm hoping to make do with my lowly PSE 5 for quite awhile.