Morro Bay on the boat

We got together with some of our very good friends the other night over in Morro Bay. Matt & Karen have been our friends since we lived in Santa Cruz and when they moved down here we were thrilled! They live in Morro Bay on their boat, Esperanza - she's a beauty, that has seen many good times!

After we enjoyed some time on the boat, watched the sun go down, debated the new studio and had a glass of wine, we left to go to dinner. I couldn't help but to take a few shots from the dingy, such a different perspective and the clouds and the sun's reflection were simply stunning. These images were meant to be seen small as I had to shoot at a super high ISO since Dan was rockin' the boat and the current was really strong. But the amazing part is that these images were taken hand-held, at like 1600 or 3200 ISO with a dragged shutter.

I like each of these for different reasons...
this first one is cool because you can see the motion of the current at the bottom of the photo and I love the reflection of the clouds just above the current area.
this one I like for the different colors of light from the dock and other moorings. On a techny note, these color appear many different colors because "not all light is equal." The camera sees light different than our eyes, for instance, tungsten light (normal light bulbs) are very yellow, flourescent light is very green, halogen light is whiter. Digital photography has a feature called white balance, which compensates for these different kinds of light. It's actually a really great feature of digital because with film, the only way to get properly exposed colors in photos was to use filters, or a flash, which is yucky light in my opinion. OK, enough nerdy photo talk...
This one is super cool because of the perspective with the foreground and background and the reflection of the power plant in the water.Matt...
Bye the way if you ever need a contractor, Matt's the guy to call, his work is superb and he's a great guy to have around in general....he's not a flaky contractor like so many are!His lovely wife, Karen...

My Danny Boy...

Awesome sunset!

On my way home from a shoot last night, I observed a truly marvelous sunset. Here are some photos taken from my car window while driving down the 101, yeah, I'm a real photo nerd! Pretty soon the CHP will be putting out ad campaigns for "Don't shoot and drive"...hehe

As I was looking at these images, I thought it might be interesting for my readers (I know you're there!) to talk about JPEG shooting versus RAW. I'll try to do this without getting too techy....hopefully you'll find it interesting!

Professional cameras have the ability to capture imagery in a few different formats, the most common being JPEG. A JPEG is a completely finished file. You can make adjustments to the brightness and contrast by opening it in Photoshop or another after-capture type program, but each time you make adjustments and open and close the finished file, you loose a bit of image quality.

I prefer to shoot in RAW. RAW files are unfinished - meaning they do not have the .jpeg extension. Since they are unfinished, we can go in and make any adjustments necessary - shooting RAW gives the ability to adjust the exposure by up to 2 stops, adjust the white balance for different lighting conditions, adjust the contrast, color saturation and the list keeps going.

Shooting RAW offers a lot of pluses for the end product, but it does take more time to process. I believe there is major upside for the little downside we call time, and that is the quality. RAW files capture millions of more colors than a finished jpeg file. This makes the file size larger and the quality premium!

Below you can see both files types - can you guess which is JPEG and which is RAW? the last one is "digitally enhanced" in photoshop.

So there you have it, a mini photo lesson on why I prefer to shoot RAW and why it's better. Some may argue, but I know what offers the best quality and even if it takes a bit more time in the post-production, we like to give our clients the best!