Also the (almost) unlimited possibilities that the RAW format
offer are worthy the size!

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm

It puts things into perspective.

A tip on the backgrounds, if you have a busy background shoot at a different angle such as crouching down and shooting up to use the SKY as your background, or shoot from a high place like a hill or stairs to catch the ground as the background avoiding all those nasty telephone poles or people you might not want in the photo. Also setting your aperature to a LOW NUMBER will maximize background BLUR which is really the best way to take people portraits.

Scott Krause
Photographer..

Great points on amateur photography in general. The rule-of-thirds alone is a huge tip for people when they start using it, and some digicams will even give an option to paint the “grid” on the screen as you’re lining up a shot.

But your bullet item on RAW strikes me as being off on several points… perhaps you can enlighten things more with a follow-up?

“If you are taking pictures in RAW format than you have to be careful not to take too many. If you do, you can corrupt your memory card.”

Being a techie guy as you are, the word “corrupt” has a very specific meaning. Do you have evidence of RAW writes causing damage to the filesystem structures itself? If it’s simply a case of the camera having a harder time to predict how many shots you have left – that’s one thing. But “corrupt” is a pretty specific term.

“RAW is a photo format that uses no compression on the photos like JPEG does.”

I do not believe this is true for all RAW formats, on all cameras. For instance, the Canon CR2 format is “lossless” compression. Much like a “ZIP” file, is lossless compression – there are a number of RAW formats that will still compress the file, but retain 100% of the image detail.

“For the most part this is unnoticeable. For the most part shooting in JPEG is the way to go, unless you plan on heavily modifying your photos in your image editor.”

When you are getting started, I would agree with this. However, once you really start to take your shots seriously – all photographers should switch over to RAW if their camera supports it. Memory is so cheap these days, storage should not be that much of an issue. Just one example? The ability to correct white-balance after the fact – ever shot “outdoor” photos, with your camera on the “indoor” setting or vice versa? This is fixed (perfectly) in about 2 seconds with a RAW file. With a JPG, you’re relying on photoshop to “guess” what might have been the right white balance. There are many other post-”snap” corrections that are possible with RAW that just are not there with JPG. It’s definitely worth a shot (pun intended).

Also there are lossy and lossless compression formats for RAW but generally I sitck to uncompressd becuzasse this makes the file sizes all the same and therefore less likely to corrupt the cards or of they do corrupt easier to recover. It also makes the ‘frame’ counter on the camera accurate.

Damien Franco