Tutorials & How-To’s

Why Shoot in RAW?

Most medium and high-end digital cameras have a setting that allows you to record images in either JPG or RAW format on the memory card.  We’ve all seen JPG images on the web and in folders on our personal computers, but it is often not very clear what the RAW format is and why we should use it.  Most novices know that JPG files are compressed files, that is, they somehow take up less space on the memory card than they would otherwise, and that RAW files are not compressed and so take up more space on the memory card.  This is not strictly true, RAW files are usually compressed, but the type of compression is loss-less.  This short paper discusses the reasons why you should use the RAW format if you’re serious about photography and the quality of your images,  but first we’ll start with a little background into what the RAW format is. Read more...

Zone XI

Zone XI

I was asked “What does Zone XI mean?”, first off, it reads “Zone Eleven” using the Roman numerals XI.  Back in the 30’s and 40’s, Ansel Adams devised a Zone System which allows us to relate various luminances of a subject to the grey values from black to white.  In his book entiled “The Negative”, Ansel defined a one stop exposure change as a change of one Zone on the exposure scale and the resulting change in grey in the print is considered one value higher or lower on the print scale. Read more...