Eggenalm

I always enjoy browsing through older photos that I made. This is a picture from November 2008 when we made a late-autumn hike to the Eggenalm and Fellhorn. It was a bright, but hazy afternoon, and I was using a polarizer with the Nikon 18-200VR (a lens that I sold in the meantime - which I regret) to somewhat eliminate that haze:


Eggenalm (FinePix S5Pro, 1/30s @ ISO 100; f/8, 40 mm DX)

I was using the S5pro for a couple of months back then and returned to my practice of shooting only raw, despite the infamous JPEG qualities of the camera. Going back to these photos today reassures me that this was and will be the best thing to do. I have all the detail, all the information, all the light and shadows in their purest form, as the camera's sensor saw it, in the file on my harddisk, and I'm free and open to play around with it whichever way I want. The strong and smooth black & white appearance of this new edit would have been impossible had I used only JPEG.

What I want to say is (once more:-) ...even if you're new to digital photography, and particularly to using a DSLR camera - store your raw sensor data from day #1. Set the camera to raw+JPEG in case you're feeling uncomfortable with raw processing now. You can get back to the raw data later when you're more firm with post processing and reach the limits of JPEG - and you'll be glad to have your raw data then.