Here are some of the articles from around the web that I found particularly interesting this week.

• How to bypass the Portrait Mode on Your Digital Camera and Get Great Portraits – From Digital Photography School. I never use the portrait mode on my camera for a few reasons, one of them being that you can’t shoot in RAW on my Canon 20D. DPS gives you some good advice to set up a portrait shot by going into your camera’s “creative”modes.
• PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT: Blown Away – Brian Auer over at the Epic Edits blog is starting a new project with the topic being overexposure. But the project needs reader input to succeed, so check it out!
• Canon 40D Reviews and Resource Page – From Photography Bay. Just in case you’ve been stranded in a cave and survived on bugs and water from cacti for the last couple months, the Canon 40D has been announced and will be on shelves very soon. Get all the skinny on this very cool new camera.
• Nikon D300 Officially Announced – Also from Photography Bay. I don’t want to leave any of you Nikon die-hards out in the cold. They’ve got their answer to the Canon 40D. Let the battle of the SLRs heat up!
• Portrait Inspiration – From PopPhoto Flash. Snag a tip on getting yourself out of that lighting rut.

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

I got an email from a reader a couple days ago asking what to do with the files that are obtained when shooting in RAW mode. This seemed like a good time to give a quick primer on shooting RAW and getting your hands on some finished photos.

Why Shoot RAW?

I’ll start with a few reasons why shooting RAW can be a good thing. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• You get a higher dynamic range. Your camera can capture a slightly broader range of light from the shadows to the highlights than if you were shooting JPEGs. Given the narrow range on digital cameras, a little extra can’t hurt.
• You capture the highest quality image. JPEGs are compressed images, and you lose some of the image quality. A RAW file gives you exactly what the sensor captured so that you can make your own decisions later on how to process the image. The trade-off here is that RAW files are much larger than their JPEG siblings thanks to the lack of compression.
• You gain ultimate control. Processing RAW files means you can tweak the image after the fact just like you were making the changes to the camera before you snapped the picture. For example, you can change the white balance on a photo after the fact. You can’t do that with a JPEG.

Software Choices

Viewing and processing RAW files requires a little bit of extra time, knowledge, and software. Here are just a few applications that I’m familiar with for viewing and processing RAW files:

Two weeks ago I showed you a really simple and cheap way to make a lighting reflector out of some aluminum foil and cardboard. It turned out to be a really popular article. It seems you folks really like it when I tell you how to get better photographs without spending much of your dough. I mean who doesn’t like keeping their money?

Shortly after that, reader Philip Litke joined the Sublime Light forums and posted a great tutorial on building an even better, bigger reflector out of an emergency space blanket, some dome tent poles, and some duct tape. You can make this one really big (which isn’t so feasible with cardboard and foil) and it collapses really small for extra portability. It’s also really cheap with the parts costing you under $20.

I have every intention of trying this out. While I do have a set of reflectors, who doesn’t want more? Besides, this is just plain cool if you ask me. When I do try it out, I’ll let you all know how it goes. Heck, maybe I’ll even make a little video tutorial along the way.

If you want to read the full tutorial courtesy of Philip, check it out here.

Oh, and Philip, thanks for joining in the fun and contributing this tip. I bet I’m not the only one who finds it cool.

The Problem

This is something that I’d bet just about all of you have experienced at least once in your photography days. Just imagine this scenario for a moment. You decide one sunny Saturday afternoon to head on outside and grab a couple of portraits under a nice big tree. You get everything set up, take a bunch of pictures, and go back home quite happy with yourself for pulling off another great batch of photos.

Then you unload the photos on your computer and take a closer look. Much to your horror, many of the pictures have these bright hot spots all over them where the sun was peaking through the leaves. Even Photoshop won’t help you here.

The Devil Is In The Details

You can learn new techniques and skills until you’re blue in the face, but where your experience really shines is the attention you pay to details and ensuring that all those skills are put together at the same time. Those leafy hot spots are one of those details that are really easy to overlook, but really show up like a sore thumb in your final photo.

This is also an area where it’s easier to make a mistake than you might think, even when you’re actively thinking about it. Let me share a mistake from my own experience.

A couple weeks ago I ran a poll looking to get to know you all a bit better. Thanks to everyone who responded, I feel like we go way back now…at least two months.

I’m at it again, but this time I want to know what kind of content you’re most interested in seeing here on Sublime Light. This information will help me shape the future of Sublime Light and keep the content most relevant to what you want to see.

So if you value your time, take just a moment to choose one or more of these topics and vote. Choose as many as you’re interested in. And as always, thanks for reading the site, and thanks for responding.

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