Raw vs JPG
I'm a nature photographer who shoots RAW. This should absolutely not be confused with being a naturist photographer who shoots in the raw because that's a very different genre and this is not that kind of website. So what do I mean by the term RAW?

RAW means your image files are delivered straight from your camera, without your camera first making a whole bunch of choices for you about how it thinks you want them.

And I'm here to tell you that RAW is your friend. If you have the option and are prepared to do a tiny bit more work (and have a RAW converter program) then RAW will allow you the kind of flexibility which often means the difference between a reject shot and a keeper.

I badly underexposed this shot of a Superb Fairy-wren (left) but because I'd taken it in RAW mode, I had the option of cranking up the exposure (right). A JPG wouldn't have let me do that, and I would have had to see what I could salvage from the shot in Photoshop.

For example, in RAW mode the exposure is still not competely locked in yet and so you still have the opportunity to crank it up or down a stop or two without all that much loss of quality. But that’s not all you can do in RAW mode. Colour saturation, noise levels, sharpness and a lot of other things which normally get decided for you before being written into a JPG file are left waiting for you to adjust, according to how you want them. Pure heaven for control freaks. And if you muck things up editing your RAW file, the original RAW file is sitting unblemished on your hard drive, ready for you to have another go.

Great Moments in Wildlife Photography No. 3: Pacific Black Duck in flight

Face detection
These days, every new compact digital camera seems to use face detection. Face detection is supposed to get the camera to search for faces in your scene, to make sure you get the right shot. Well, speaking as a wildlife photographer, I don't like it.

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