On Saturday 19th February, we went to London and visited the Natural History Museum. For starters, there was a huge queue to get in and a light rain but I managed to take a few shots of the external architecture and this statue in the garden. I've been shooting in raw mode with my Fujifilm S200EXR and whilst having the ability to tweak things like exposure at a grass-roots level is good, I find the software bundled with the camera poor and strips the EXIF data from the file. Maybe I'm just being fussy but I like to know what aperture and shutter speed a shot was taken with so that I can learn and recreate the shot if I want. I get to see what worked well and what did not work so well. Shooting in jpeg has the problem that the camera takes the data from the chip and sets things like exposure levels and colour balance and then saves that data whilst discarding all the surplus data. Raw on the other hand records exactly what the chip saw and allows you to do the processing very much like the old darkroom techniques of my youth. Whilst, with digital photography, I am denied doing the developing, the processing side is now available to me. But, as I said, I was not completely happy with the Finepix Studio raw Software.
So, looking at opensource alternatives, I found UFRaw which handles the raw files from the S200EXR very well. It is quite complex but I'm getting the hang of it. It's not as polished as Adobe Lightroom, but doesn't come with the inflated price-tag either. And here's the important bit for me, it allows for the embedding of the EXIF data. It allows me to look at exposure levels, white balance and curves and saves out in several formats from lossless TIFF to Jpegs with variable compression levels. I must say that the developer has really done a great job and I would recommend this to anyone like me who wants to shoot raw but does not want to shell out £200 on conversion software.
Paintshop Pro or one of the multitude of similar software like GIMP are a must for giving your photos that polished edge. I'm still learning the basics but I'm getting there. I feel that my last photos taken from Margate Cemetery have been given a little extra punch which I could not have achieved from just my camera on the severely overcast and misty day. I'm hoping to get out more and take plenty more photos and people have started to give me requests for shots that they want taken.
On Saturday 19th February, we went to London and visited the Natural History Museum. For starters, there was a huge queue to get in and a light rain but I managed to take a few shots of the external architecture and this statue in the garden. I've been shooting in raw mode with my Fujifilm S200EXR and whilst having the ability to tweak things like exposure at a grass-roots level is good, I find the software bundled with the camera poor and strips the EXIF data from the file. Maybe I'm just being fussy but I like to know what aperture and shutter speed a shot was taken with so that I can learn and recreate the shot if I want. I get to see what worked well and what did not work so well. Shooting in jpeg has the problem that the camera takes the data from the chip and sets things like exposure levels and colour balance and then saves that data whilst discarding all the surplus data. Raw on the other hand records exactly what the chip saw and allows you to do the processing very much like the old darkroom techniques of my youth. Whilst, with digital photography, I am denied doing the developing, the processing side is now available to me. But, as I said, I was not completely happy with the Finepix Studio raw Software.
So, looking at opensource alternatives, I found UFRaw which handles the raw files from the S200EXR very well. It is quite complex but I'm getting the hang of it. It's not as polished as Adobe Lightroom, but doesn't come with the inflated price-tag either. And here's the important bit for me, it allows for the embedding of the EXIF data. It allows me to look at exposure levels, white balance and curves and saves out in several formats from lossless TIFF to Jpegs with variable compression levels. I must say that the developer has really done a great job and I would recommend this to anyone like me who wants to shoot raw but does not want to shell out £200 on conversion software.
Paintshop Pro or one of the multitude of similar software like GIMP are a must for giving your photos that polished edge. I'm still learning the basics but I'm getting there. I feel that my last photos taken from Margate Cemetery have been given a little extra punch which I could not have achieved from just my camera on the severely overcast and misty day. I'm hoping to get out more and take plenty more photos and people have started to give me requests for shots that they want taken.
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