Shooting in RAW

So getting back up and on my horse and starting to post again. So today I am going to talk at you about shooting in camera RAW. Now usually I am a big believer in shooting and not editing your photos much in Photoshop but I am not dumb and I know that sometimes that just isn't an option. Over the thanksgiving holiday I usually travel up to Dallas with my parents to spend the holiday with my family on my mothers side. My aunt lives hear this beautiful park that has a trail through wooded area. Me and my mother decided to take a walk through the path after thanksgiving dinner. I being me brought my camera along but it was quickly turning into night before we were even close to leaving the house so i still brought my camera but with a different idea in mind.
Shooting in RAW is one of the most amazing things to do because if your image is too dark or too light it can recover more of the image than if you just shot in regular jpeg. Here are some of the pictures I took in a before and after sense.

 Here is probably my favorite image from the holiday. the first is the before picture, the original. Using raw i was able to bump the contrast and up the lightness of the sidewalk without lightening the grass dark. I was going for a more silhouetted look but wanted the sidewalk to stay lit up too.

 Next up is an actual silhouette but the upside for shooting raw with this one was basically bringing back the blue in the sky without compromising it with noise.

 Finally is this little gem, was an amazing shot that I would never have noticed without my mother. She pointed out that the street light was creating the leaf pattern on the sidewalk. I wasn't able to stand super still so I couldn't use a super slow shutter so to get the color that I wanted to achieve I had to rely on the amazingness of RAW.

It isn't really that easy to explain what you can do in RAW and I by no means am an expert. I have only recently started shooting in raw and I do have to say it is a wonderful asset if you are shooting a wedding or an event because just in case you over or under expose a photo you don't have to worry!

I hope this helps a little and like i said i plan on posting more in the future and hopefully with some fun exciting things! Good luck and always have fun shooting!

Silhouettes!

So today I will tell you how to create silhouettes in your camera without photoshop, well you might need to tweak it in photoshop but you don't need to do any major things in photoshop.

First off this is not an exact thing because you are relying on the sun which can be unpredictable. First since you will be outside, well you can do this in a studio but its not as fun and pretty, but if you are trying to capture a sunset silhouette or a more natural setting then you will want to make sure the sun or wherever your light is coming from is behind your subject.

Next for camera settings what you will want is a slightly higher f-stop one because it will help darken the subjects and two it will darken the sky so it doesn't come out white, a faster shutter speed which helps with keeping the subjects dark and a decent ISO around 200-250 sometimes you will need to go up in your ISO if your background is too dark but I don't recommend touching your ISO because I believe I've mentioned before the higher your ISO the grainier your image is. So usually I recommend adjusting your f-stop first or your shutter. Remember the faster the shutter the darker the image and the higher the f-stop the darker the image will be too.

I would recommend doing this at several different options because like I said earlier the sun in unpredictable especially if you have any kind of cloud coverage or if you are working with a sunset. Once you have the imaged you might need to go into photoshop to  up the contrast a bit if it was too light for your subjects or if your background is too dark or too light.

 You can use this idea with pretty much anything people or objects but like I said you will want to keep your light source behind the subject because if there is light on the subject it will be very hard to make them shadowed.