Do you shoot in RAW??
On Saturday I attended the 1st (annual?) Blog Better Boston event put on by one of my blog friends, Amy, and her blog/friend/business partner Alana. It was a conference type event especially for Boston area bloggers, with panels, workshops, and awesome sponsors.
Not gonna lie, I was most excited about just spending the day with some of my favorite bloggers, but I found a number of the speakers/sessions VERY helpful!
Some of the sessions I attended were: Photo Editing, Awesome Metrics with Google Analytics, Wordpress Tips & Tricks, and Food Photography!
Some of the info, esp. on Analytics and Wordpress, was a little over my head, but I still came away with a lot more knowledge than I had before.
One of the terms that kept getting thrown around a lot during the two photography related sessions was shooting in "RAW". I have heard this many times before but really didn't think much of it. I also had no idea if I was shooting in RAW or not. Well, I wasn't and had the instructor show me where that setting was.
Basically if your not shooting in raw, you're shooting in jpeg... I still don't fully understand this, but as I was uploading my photos tonight I found out the hard way that I'm still such a newb!
And if you have no idea what I’m even talking about, check out this webpage with a great comparison of Raw vs. JPEG.
So my new and improved "raw" photos needed a special plug-in on my computer to be able to view them! And now I'm converting them back to jpeg so that I can actually use them…oy. Probably shouldn’t have just switched over so nonchalantly!
Moral of this story is that I still have a lot to learn! But I’m also super excited to apply all my new knowledge!!
I was able to try out the set up our Food Photography instructor had of some Pretzel Crisps (another sponsor!), using a wooden board and her Spider Light set up
Also applied some of my new editing knowledge, and I must say it came out pretty good!
Not sure if I see a Spider Light in my future…not exactly a small piece of equipotent! But it was cool to see how it created such natural looking light! That photo above was taken in a pretty dark room, lit by her spider light.
And now that I’ve converted my files back to “normal” I can give you a brief overview of the delightful crab cakes I made tonight for my mom and Brian.
That premium lump crab meat is actually pretty darn good!! It was $8.99 at Trader Joes. Pretty good for a when I have a crab craving :)
I used this Cooking Light Recipe, but halved it as I only had 8oz of crabmeat.
The recipe is for 4 servings as a meal. I wanted these as an appetizer, so I made smaller cakes and ended up with 9, 1.5” diameter cakes.
My changes to the recipe were:
- using red bell pepper instead of green
- I used the whole egg, instead of a half even though I had half the amount of crab
- Used dried tarragon in the sauce, and half as much
- omitted the ground red pepper (mom doesn’t like spicy), used some fresh ground black pepper though
Prepped the cakes a couple hours before dinner
Then cooked them up right before serving
I LOVED the Remoulade sauce!! We had a panko crusted Cod for dinner and used this sauce for the fish too!
And just for fun, some flowers…these were my 2nd “replacements” for my Valentine’s day flowers ;)
Gorgeous spray roses! $9.99 for a big bunch!! So many that I had extra to fill two mini bud vases for the window sill!
So back to my camera issues…
Anyone have any tips about shooting in RAW and still being able to easily upload/use my photo files?? Something that can convert them to jpegs easier?? I had to save-as each photo!! So annoying!
Is there a different setting on my camera I should use?? I have a Canon Rebel XTi if that helps.
For now I’m going back to my old setting in jpeg until I really figure this out!
Happy Sunday!
