Settings to use shooting outdoors festival

[Muse]

I'm going to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass today, probably tomorrow too. I'll be on roller skates with my Pentax K-x DSLR with 32GB card and a terrific Pentax 18-250 multi-range lens and lens shade.

I normally shoot JPG, the full 12 megapixel setting. Yesterday, I had it set to shutter priority at 1/250 seconds, just so I could assure pretty much no blurring, and hope the autofocus would take care of the focus and get pretty good depth of field.


I've never really shot RAW. Should I? Probably I'm not going to edit any of this stuff, but suppose I should get into that. I always (at this festival) get some terrific shots, and obviously they would be even better with some editing, at least cropping. I don't have Photoshop, but do have an old Photoshop Essentials set of disks. Maybe I should invest in Photoshop. What do you think?

What and how would you shoot? What should I shoot? Suggestions?

 

[MrSquished]

I always shoot RAW I guess out of habit. For just cropping though it doesn't matter. You can always batch process a bunch of RAWS into JPEGS if you decide they don't need much editing. So there is that. You are goin to need more than a 32GB card if you are shooting events all in RAW though

 

[elitejp]

Outside with sunshine i would bring a flash and shoot in av mode.

 

[Paladin3]

I shoot .jpg for 99% of my work, paid and personal. When I do shoot RAW it's RAW + .jpg and I almost always just use the jpg. RAW is a tool for uber tricky lighting, but if you set your camera and exposure correctly it's unnecessary a lot of the time. Maybe I'd feel differently if I shot art photos and creatively post process everything, but I mostly shoot people and having the camera make .jpgs save me a lot of time.

During a shoot I verify my exposure by peeping at the exposure histograms in camera. That's important because if I screw up too much it's harder to process a .jpg into something nice than it would be a RAW image. So there is a big plus for RAW, but it can be a crutch sometimes.

Photoshop and/or Lightroom are $$$ and most photographers will only use about 20% of those programs capabilities. Unless you really want to dive into the program, save your money and use your Photoshop Essentials or a free photo editor.

Flash helps fill in shadows on subjects in the bright sunlight if you are close enough. I use it habitually outdoors, but mostly dialed down a stop so it's not totally overpowering the available light.

What mode to shoot in is a shot-by-shot decision based on what is most important. The max flash sync on your camera is 1/180th so I'd shoot at that, probably in shutter priority mode with the flash set to maybe a stop under. That's a good place to start and you can adjust as needed.

Sorry for the long ramble and hope you had a blast at the festival.

 

[biostud]

I shoot raw+jpg also but edit the raw files in photoshop elements + nik collection which is much cheaper than the full photoshop and does everything I need. Photoshop elements are often on sale, and you don't need to buy the newest version if you just do basic editing.

 

[MrSquished]

I shoot .jpg for 99% of my work, paid and personal. When I do shoot RAW it's RAW + .jpg and I almost always just use the jpg. RAW is a tool for uber tricky lighting, but if you set your camera and exposure correctly it's unnecessary a lot of the time. Maybe I'd feel differently if I shot art photos and creatively post process everything, but I mostly shoot people and having the camera make .jpgs save me a lot of time.

During a shoot I verify my exposure by peeping at the exposure histograms in camera. That's important because if I screw up too much it's harder to process a .jpg into something nice than it would be a RAW image. So there is a big plus for RAW, but it can be a crutch sometimes.

Photoshop and/or Lightroom are $$$ and most photographers will only use about 20% of those programs capabilities. Unless you really want to dive into the program, save your money and use your Photoshop Essentials or a free photo editor.

Flash helps fill in shadows on subjects in the bright sunlight if you are close enough. I use it habitually outdoors, but mostly dialed down a stop so it's not totally overpowering the available light.

What mode to shoot in is a shot-by-shot decision based on what is most important. The max flash sync on your camera is 1/180th so I'd shoot at that, probably in shutter priority mode with the flash set to maybe a stop under. That's a good place to start and you can adjust as needed.

Sorry for the long ramble and hope you had a blast at the festival.

Why don't you just shoot RAW and if all goes well just convert all the RAW files to JPEG when you get home after seeing that they all shot well. You can do that while you go and do whatever it is you want, all you are using are cpu cycles and a little bit of electricity. If things don't go well for some of the shots you are guaranteed to have the RAW files to tweak them out.

 

[Rifter]

Why don't you just shoot RAW and if all goes well just convert all the RAW files to JPEG when you get home after seeing that they all shot well. You can do that while you go and do whatever it is you want, all you are using are cpu cycles and a little bit of electricity. If things don't go well for some of the shots you are guaranteed to have the RAW files to tweak them out.

This is what i do.

 

[Paladin3]

Why don't you just shoot RAW and if all goes well just convert all the RAW files to JPEG when you get home after seeing that they all shot well. You can do that while you go and do whatever it is you want, all you are using are cpu cycles and a little bit of electricity. If things don't go well for some of the shots you are guaranteed to have the RAW files to tweak them out.

That would just add time to my normal post processing before I send jobs out to print. If I could get my camera calibrated to my various printers I wouldn't have to do any post processing at all.

I shoot Santa photos at the mall during Christmas. My customers are pretty loyal because I have reasonable prices and work to get good shots of their kids. I make it up on volume by going from camera to editing to prints off of an ink jet printer in about 15 minutes, shooting and printing 30-40+ children in a 4 hour stretch. I could never do that if I shot raw and had to post process all those photos by hand.

This year I'm moving from post processing in Photoshop to something more automated in Lightroom. I bought a new set of monolights so my lighting will be exactly the same in every shot, as well as a better tethering system so images go straight into the computer. If everything goes well my daughter can edit with customers while I shoot the next clients. Provided I get everything right in camera, all she will have to do is crop and hit send to printer at the appropriate size and quanity.

RAW is a great tool, but it's not the right tool for every job. And I've never had an in camera .jpg I couldn't tweak to get an excellent print out of unless I blew the exposure to the point that shooting RAW wouldn't have helped.