http://www.losttracksoftime.com/p17739217

Follow the above link to my photos from the recent Lerro Productions photo charter at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga.

The night before the charter started I was out past midnight for dinner and drinks with Pete Lerro and Mitch Goldman, we had a most interesting and stimulating conversation about reality based photography verses digital manipulation and compositing via Photoshop. I am one who always tries to capture the picture as perfectly as possible with the camera, but afterwards use a RAW editor and Photoshop to its fullest for finalizing the image files as my mind's eye wants them to appear. In talking with Pete and Mitch I secretly decided to challenge myself on this charter - to shoot in JPEG only, relying heavily on my camera platform's potential to process internally with the Acros monochrome film simulation mode. It would be a risky move, not having the flexible RAW files to fall back on if I did not ace the exposure settings. In some of these photos I purposely shot at a higher then normal ISO to accentuate the conversion of noise to an important texture, with others I underexposed the shadow areas to add contrast. A 50mm prime lens was used as much as possible to yield the field of view similar to the human eye, and as a throwback to my roots of analog photography.

In conducting this experiment of shooting JPEGs-only I really liked the results, to my tastes this gallery looks less sterile and digital while having a lot more soul. In Photoshop I severely limited myself to the amount of post-processing, doing only minimal tweaking; mainly dodging and burning. All of this has made me think seriously about steering clear of working with RAW for the near future. Less time sitting in front of a computer means more opportunity to be in the field with a camera.

Your thoughts?

Matthew

Nice shots.

RAW or JPG... For me, it depends on the image end use. Most of my images nowadays are for news or the web, not art so JPG works quite well enough and the files are much smaller than the equivalent RAW. If I do need to get artsy, I shoot full manual in RAW. If I shoot gray scale and want to add punch with high contrast, I'll use an orange filter over the lens. That's about as fancy as I'll get. For commercial use, RAW is a must for adjustments, manipulation and compositing.

Technicalities are interesting, but when the medium becomes the message we're getting into McLuhan territory. Nicely evocative images in any case.

Eric:
Its nice to have the both options of RAW and JPEG in the bag of tools to best suit the conditions.
I will continue to hone my skills; nothing beats practice.

Dave:
I feel the viewer does not care how the image was created. It is much more important if that person reacts emotionally.

I thank you both for the compliment!
Matthew