Wildlife photography - an unhelpful guide

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Raw vs JPG

I'm a nature photographer who shoots RAW. This shouldn't 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 later (right). Working in JPG mode swouldn'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 temperature, 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 working on your RAW file, the original RAW file is sitting unblemished on your hard drive, ready for you to muck things up again.

Face detection

These days, every new compact digital camera seems to use face detection. Face detection is supposed to find faces in your scene, to make sure you get the right shot. I can see the logic in it, but speaking as a wildlife photographer, I'm not so sure about it.

Above: Without face detection and below: with face detection

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Beginners’ series on
digital SLR photography

• A beginners’ guide — basics for digital SLRs
• Learning from examples — picking up where the first article left off
• Understanding histograms — making sense of this handy tool
• Preventing washed-out photos — why it happens, and how to prevent it
• Understanding Exposure Compensation — why your photo subject can look so badly exposed, and what to do about it
• Megapixels — how many is enough?

Photo Sales

• Photo Library — pics of Australian critters

An unhelpful guide

• Wildlife photography — this guide will not make you into a better photographer
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