One of the first pieces advice I give to people who wonder where to start getting their photos to become better, is to shoot in RAW. There’s many obvious reasons for why this is a good idea.

With RAW, the final result can be sharper, you have better control over white balance, you get wider dynamic range, you can do HDR photography, and, well, it’s what all the cool kids done. Recently, however, I have moved away from shooting in RAW for several reasons. Or, to be precise, I have started shooting in RAW+JPG.

Here are some compelling arguments for why you should do the same…

Becoming a better photographer

Holding a bunny to your face while wearing full Motorcycle protective gear is a great way to become a better photographer. Aw, c'mon, give me a break, what would YOU use to illustrate this article? (clicky for bigger)

RAW is great because it is lenient – you can over-expose a photo quite significantly, and still rescue the highlights, because you have significantly higher bit-depth (and more information) than you would do with JPGs.

This is a life-saver for press, event, and action photographers: The fact that you aren’t completely buggered even if you’ve screwed up the exposure a fraction is a godsent!

The problem is that I’ve recently talked to a lot of photographer of the ‘new garde’. People who have rarely – or never – shot on film, and are unaware of how often RAW is helping them out of a hole. There’s two ways of looking at this: Either, use the extra flexibility RAW gives you on a regular basis, and accept that we’re now in the digital age. Or shoot as if you’re still shooting on film, and use the extra flexibility as a safety buffer.

Bunny is sad because his compact camera doesn't take photos in RAW. (clicky for bigger)

I’m a strong believer in the latter: Ultimately, when you present your photos, you have to save them as 8-bit colour anyway, so you’re in fact re-compressing the image back into a lower bit depth. This isn’t a bad thing: the human eye can’t really cope with more than 8 bits anyway.

The problem is that it’s difficult to estimate how much of the photo is over-exposed when you’re relying on RAW to save you – and there will come a day where you are relying on it, and you’re off. There’s only so much recovery you can do of a photograph, and if you miscalculate, you don’t have a safety buffer anymore.

Personally, I’ve become a huge fan of trying to take perfect exposures out of the camera: Shoot as if the JPEG is your film. Get the white balance right. Get the exposure right. Sharpen the JPG in-camera. Set the saturation and contrast you like. In short; Make your JPEGs be as perfect straight out of the camera as possible. In addition to making you a much better and more conscious photographer, this has several benefits. To wit:

Better previews

Getting the white balance right on shots like this is challenging, but hellasatisfying. It's good to know you can fall back on RAW if you did make a hash of it after all (clicky for bigger)

RAW photos are unsharpened out of the camera. This is a blessing, because as we discussed in the article on how you can sharpen your photos, you should never sharpen your photos twice. Your JPGs are sharpened in-camera, which means that if you sharpen them on your computer, you’re not getting as high quality as you could. Not a good thing.

In situations where you're taking lots of photos (like when snapping gigs), it's a relief to have JPG preview - it saves you from opening hundreds (or even thousands) of RAW files to find out which ones turned out well.

The flopside of this, however, is that RAW photos can look flat and lack energy. The photos that really zing are the ones that are tack-sharp – and if you’re only looking at RAW photos, you may actually miss the photo that is sharpest, because it hasn’t been sharpened to its full potential.

When you shoot RAW+JPG and your JPEGs are perfectly exposed and whitebalanced, they are the ultimate previewing tool: Full resolution previews, beautifully sharp, which your computer can deal with very quickly. Even better, if you need to e-mail or upload previews of a shoot anywhere, it’s an order of magnitude faster to resize and compress JPGs than RAW files.

So, Shoot with JPG, keep them, and use them for previewing purposes. If you decide to edit any of ‘em, use the RAW files, but at least you’ll have a much better picture (har har) of the potential of your photos

Submitting photos to magazines

Enough with the useful captions already. Here's a picture of a guy in Vietnam with 10 (yes! Ten!) cases of beer on his motorbike. (clicky for bigger)

So you occasionally shoot paperazzi stuff? You do events? You shoot news? Honestly, you don’t want to piss off the picture editors: if you send them a photo they’ll have to do a lot of work on, you’ll need to have a damn fine explanation… And find yourself some other customers, because they won’t use you again.

They’re on extremely tight deadlines, and they prefer photos they can just drop into their page layouts without fiddling with them too much. Shoot perfect JPGs, and that’s usually good enough for magazine use.

Let them know that you have a RAW file if they need it, of course, but 99 times out of a hundred and twenty two, they won’t want it – they don’t need the hassle.

Workflow speed

My university professor stole a wise saying from someone else once: Work smarter, not harder. This saying really is eminently applicable here.

I don’t care how fast your computer is – RAW will slow you down in one way or another. If you organise your photos so you can preview the JPGs, you’re making your life a lot easier.

If the JPG looks out of focus, the RAW will be too – that’ll save you a few seconds opening the RAW file to check. Multiply that by 300 photos, and you’ve saved yourself 10 minutes. Presto!

There’s no reason not to

This model wants you to shoot RAW+JPG. Just look at how stern she looks. Would you dare not to? Thought so. Grab your camera right now and change your settings. (clicky for bigger)

Set your camera to RAW+JPG, and bring plenty of memory cards. They cost next to nothing these days, and if you do a shoot where you know you don’t need to keep the JPGs, you can always trash them after you’ve downloaded them – sort ‘em by size (the RAW files tend to be 3-4 times bigger than the JPGs) and delete half the smallest files. Or sort ‘em by type and delete all the JPGs. Whatever you prefer.

If you have enough memory cards (and you should. Really. If you don’t, head over to Amazon and be Amazed (groan) at how cheap they are), there really is no reason not to shoot in RAW+JPG.

Go on. Give it a shot. And let me know how much time you’re saving :-)

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It is relatively self-explanatory that doing a photo critique is quite difficult. What few people stop to think about, however, is that receiving a photo critique can be as difficult – if not more difficult: When you move beyond mere snapshots and start putting more of yourself into your photographs, you are a lot more intimately involved with the work you are putting out there.

Putting your photos up for criticism – whether it is at your local photography club, via a site such as DeviantArt, or even when asking a good friend to give some feed-back – is like putting your own head in the guillotine and taking a chance.

Nonetheless, it’s one of the best ways to improve as a photographer, and one of the best lessons you’ll learn is to discover how to deal with negative photo critiques…

Hayley in the 1950s by Photocritic.org, on Flickr

1) It may come across as crass, rude, or wrong, but there may be a kernel of truth in it.

If someone tells you “LOL learn how 2 autofocus, you dweeb”, you need to do 2 things: Live in the happy knowledge that whilst your camera might have had an off day, at least you know how to string a grammatically correct sentence together.

And perhaps that picture is a little bit blurry, now that you look at it closely…

Take a step back, and take commentary on face value. If you honestly can’t say you agree with a piece of criticism, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you are objective enough to be able to try and see it from their viewpoint.

2) They might disagree, but they are your audience.

Ultimately, you are the photographer, and what you decide is how the final result gets done. Nobody can tell you what to do, and if you like your photo, then you’ve won one of the huge battles.

At the same time, it’s quite possible that the people ripping your photos to shreds are the people you were trying to target: whether you’re thinking about selling them as microstock, as art works, or just to give your mum a present is irrelevant.

Your photos are out there for interpretation, and if you care about the message you are sending, you’ll have to go the extra mile to make sure that they aren’t getting misinterpreted.

3) As soon as you let ‘em go, you no longer own ‘em.

It’s the curse of all writers and poets: They spend months – years, even – crafting their masterpiece, and then nobody ‘gets’ it. They all ‘get it’ wrong. Tell you what though, that’s where part of the beauty comes from: If you are taking a photo which you meant to symbolise the innocence of youth, and your first 10 commenters feel it’s a strong commentary on, say, child abuse, then they are per definition right.

It is not your job to interpret your own photographs, it is your job to take them. This is a good thing: if people can make up their own story to go with the photograph – their own connotations and bias, as it were – they are much more likely to connect emotionally with the photograph. If this is achieved; if someone is caused to feel something because of your photo; your mission is complete.

4) They talk. You shut up.

Remember that, just like you are not there to interpret your work, you’re not there to defend it either.

In a way, the best thing you can do is to never respond to any criticism. Let’s be honest – you will never be able to re-create the EXACT same image ever again anyway. Take the criticisms on board as points of reference for future photographs.

Learn from your mistakes, learn about what makes your audience buzz, and learn from your own opinions of your work.

5) Remember that the best works might be universally hated: Be thick-skinned.

Technical aspects of your photographs might be objective: A photo can be accidentally over-exposed, blurry, or have some rubbish in the background which makes your photograph less-than-perfect. Once you start killing the technical foibles of your photographic work one by one (don’t go too perfectionist on it though, it’s not useful to end up deleting all of your photos because of every little detail), the actual creative work starts shining through, and this is where the worst potential for getting hurt comes from.

You can kick yourself for small technical mistakes in your photographs (and you’ll continue making them for the rest of your photographic career), but if people start critiquing your artistic choices, it’s a different thing altogether.

The important thing here is to believe in your own work 100%: If you feel you’ve done it right, and if the image is an accurate representation of what you were trying to do, then all you can do is to shrug off their comments and move on.

Just think about it: Pink Floyd, The Decemberists, Pendulum, Metallica, Billy Joel, Leonard Cohen, Zero 7 – they’ve all been called ‘the best band ever’ by reviewers at one point or another, and yet it is never difficult to find someone who doesn’t care about – or even actively dislikes – them.