Here are the rules:

• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are the eight things about me:

1. For the first six years of my life, we had no indoor toilet facilities in our house. Instead we had an outhouse in the backyard.
2. For seven years, I commuted three hours each way to get to and from work. That’s six hours of travel each day if the train ran on time, which it often did not!
3. For eight years, I was an independent computer consultant and wrote applications for a wide variety of customers using several programming languages and tools.
4. In 1991, inspired by the work of ????????Grady Booch, I wrote a paper entitled Introduction to Object Oriented Theory and Concepts.
5. I have another Blog entitled A Layman’s Thoughts.
6. I became a grandfather at the age of 44 and now have three wonderful grandchildren, the oldest of whom is five.
7. I plow snow from my driveway with a little Farmall-Cub farm tractor that was built around 1947.
8. In July, I will have been very happily married to the most wonderful woman in the world for 30 years.

Now I have to tag eight other Bloggers. I tag:

1. Mrs. Meg Logan at Meg Logan’s Blog
2. Steve Mann at AbleBrains
3. Bill McCann at What Did We Learn Today?
4. Brian White at Background Exposure
5. Arthur Eiss at Art vs. God
6. Mickey Grackin at OIC Productions

Well, that’s all I can come up with, so I guess I’ve broken the rules!

Size Matters:
One of the biggest problems with which both Roy and I struggled is the fact that RAW images, especially if you add a JPEG as well, take up a lot of space on memory cards.

Both Roy and I shoot the Nikon D50. This camera uses SD cards and is old enough that it does not support the new high capacity standard. That means that the largest card that can be used is 2 Gigabytes (GB).

When I shot JPEG only, even 1GB cards would hold nearly 1000 images. Shooting RAW plus JPEG as I now do, a 2GB card holds fewer than 250! Size is an important problem and a difficult one to handle.

I have addressed it in two ways. I now have multiple 2GB cards; and carry more than one any time I am out shooting. 2GB cards are very inexpensive now that the high-capacity cards are available. I also move images to my computer at every opportunity. I have a laptop that I can take with me on vacation, but there are devices (not cheap) that can substitute for a laptop.

Needed Skills:
Another issue is the fact that RAW images need more manipulation than JPEGs. When you shoot RAW, each of your images must be loaded into an image editor to be converted to JPEG so people can see them on their computers easily and so they can be printed or used on the Web. The first time I tried shooting RAW every image I loaded into my editor looked terrible.

At first I thought that this was because I had been taking terrible pictures all along, but the camera was fixing them for me. RAW images have absolutely zero processing done to them in the camera. They are nothing more than the raw representation of the photons captured by the image sensor. Of course they also contain some very significant metadata; some of which we see as EXIF information even in our JPEG images.

But I also noticed that no matter how I processed them I was unable to make these images look as good as the JPEGs had looked. It turns out that the problem was with my software, Corel Paint Shop Pro. The RAW converter they provided was terrible. (Newer versions of Paint Shop Pro are much improved, by the way.)

The Right Tools:
Even so, software is very important when processing RAW images. It is critical to use software with a good RAW converter. I can’t speak to the converter in The Gimp, but the latest versions of Paint Shop Pro work well as do Adobe products such as Lightroom, Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements.

If you shoot Nikon like Roy and I do, I’d strongly recommend that you get a copy of Capture NX. This software is available from Nikon and is created by NIK software. There is a 30-day trial you can download for free as well.

It’s great for a lot of reasons that I didn’t initially understand. Most importantly NX never touches the original bits in your RAW image. It always makes a copy and works on that. The copy is stored in the same file as the original image, so this behavior can be less than obvious at first glance. This means that anything you do to the image can be undone completely and harmlessly. That simply isn’t the case with any JPEG image unless you use layers for every change you make.

More Reasons:
When you shoot RAW you can make any adjustment available within your camera (other than stuff like zooming out or changing aperture or shutter speed) after the fact.

So if you accidentally left the camera in Manual, or if your flash wasn’t ready, and you underexposed the most important shot of the day by two stops because of it, you can just adjust the exposure. Take a look at this example.

Open this in Capture NX and drag the slider to show +2 EV…

…and out comes this:

If, like me, you also occasionally leave the world of automatic white balance, and then fail to check it before shooting, you might end up with a color cast you don’t want. This too can easily be corrected completely in “post” with no degradation of the image quality and zero skill on your part beyond knowing how to make a selection from a drop-down list.

This was shot using flash with the camera set to tungsten white balance by mistake.

A quick change just as simple as the one above in Capture NX…

…yields this:

For more information see:

Thom Hogan at ByThom

Scott Kelby

Moose Peterson

I thought I had said all I have to say on that topic, but this week my daughter read me an excerpt from a book she had borrowed from the library. The book is entitled Green Housekeeping and was written by Ellen Sandbeck. On pages 118 and 119, Ms. Sandbeck recounts the Clive and Ak study in a much clearer way than the version of the information to which I had earlier linked. Consequently, I thought I’d mention the book here so that people searching for information on food-safe woods can find it more easily. Google has scanned this work, and you can see the referenced pages here.

As it turns out, other sites also reference the study. One such site is that of cutting board maker, BW WoodWorks®. There are a number of others as a quick search on “Cliver and Ak” will attest.

Given the apparent lack of any scientific evidence to the contrary, coupled with the experiential evidence of cutting board users themselves, it appears that wood is the way to go. One important question that always arises is, “which species of wood is safest?” The study tested at least seven species and found very similar results.

As I said in my earlier article on the subject, “I am certainly not an expert in biology, nor am I a doctor or anything remotely connected to those professions. I am simply still living and healthy after showing no concern about my wooden cutting boards.”

Please; go and read this information for yourself. I’ll be using wood.

While Ken Rockwell remains a fan of JPEG, I have converted to shooting Raw. The final straw came as a result of two images I needed to process.

The first image is this one of a quiet morning on Seventh Lake in the Adirondack Mountains:

While this is a nice image, it needs to be brightened slightly to add shadow detail in the trees, and the light fixture at the peak of the boathouse roof gets distracting when you do that. Here is the result I needed:

The problem is that I only have this image in JPEG format. I wasn’t shooting Raw when this was taken. I wanted to print this image 20×30 for my portfolio. After manipulating it a couple of times (because I wasn’t clued in to the ramifications at first) I sent it to Shutterfly for printing. What came back was good, but has significant pixellation and artifacts due to resizing.

The original image is 1.74 megabytes on disk. The manipulated copy I sent for printing was 535 kilobytes due to lossy JPEG compression! I lost approximately two-thirds of all the data captured by my camera’s sensor! Of course the image I got back was less than perfect.

The second image was this one (I only show a crop here because it’s of my granddaughter and I don’t post images of our grandchildren on the Web):

As you can see, the image is too dark. This happened because she was playing and I was shooting, but the best image happened at a moment when the flash wasn’t ready. So I needed to brighten the image. Here’s the result:

Note that terrible noise behind her hair. Removing that meant a lot of work using layers and further degrading parts of the image. This noise was noticeable even in a 4×6 print.

JPEG images delete some of the data captured by the camera. Raw images allow it to be preserved no matter what I do–assuming I use intelligent software. I can’t afford to throw away image data, so now I shoot Raw. Since my Nikon has the option to shoot both Raw and JPEG at the same time, I actually do that so that I can quickly print some images or show them to family without processing them.

I won’t be going back.