G'day Mate

Two posts ago I mentioned that I listen to a podcast called "Shutters, Inc." by Shelton Muller, a renouned photographer and editor of Total Image magazine. I contacted him via email a few days ago asking for advice on how to determine whether one has dust on the sensor of one's digital SLR (a fancy name for a digital camera with interchangeable lenses). I also sent him a copy of the moonset before sunrise shot below to give him an example of why I suspected that I might have a little dust on my sensor. He wrote back within hours and said that he'd like to hire me to shoot photos for his magazine...not really--that was in my dream last night, though.

What he really did was write back within hours in his very kind and cheerful Australian way, "G'day! How are you matey?" He gave me some intelligent advice that I won't bore you with here. Then he emailed me again, and this is where he made my day. No, this is where he made my year. His second email said only this; "BTW - I love the shot!"

So then I walked over to my boss's desk and told him I had to quit because I am going to be a pro photographer. Oops, that was in my dream, too. In any case, I was quite flattered.

One of the most helpful things I learned from Shelton is the need to shoot photographs in RAW format rather than JPEG. Typically, only Digital SLRs can do this. The reason for this is that RAW stores a lot more color information than a JPEG because JPEG compresses things dramatically. The drawback to RAW, of course, is that each photograph takes up about 5 megabytes in my camera. That's not a huge issue, however, now that flash memory costs less than $100 for 2 gigabytes.

In practical terms, this extra color information means that I can correct the color balance once I get the photo onto my computer without losing any of the original photo's detail. You cannot do that with JPEG because the JPEG format has already compressed out a bunch of information. I always wondered how pro photographers manage to get incredibly vibrant colors even when shooting in shade which tends to have a rather cool cast with less than usual contrast. So now I just need a 4 week sabatical this summer to live up in the high mountains a few miles to the east of us so I can start my fine art photograph collection.

Comments

[marné]

i have four weeks of sabbatical :o)

You could start a flickr account to store your photos, so you don't use up your whole hard drive.

[empty nest]

You had me "going" for a minute there with the job change. Glad you are having fun with photography again.

[Johndeere j]

Now, I can tell my friends here in China that my son is a "very famous" (a term they us a lot here)professional photographer.

[lazyeye]

I'll pass the photo info on to Vanessa, she's got a Rebel SLR but is light on the techno jargon. She just likes to point and shoot, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot...and usually ends up with some pretty nice stuff.