This is a really geeky post. It’s sort of like listening to me in person, only you don’t feel obligated to stand there with your eyes glazed over and trying to yawn through your nose.

Since Anna was born, I’m on my fifth digital camera (not counting my wife’s or daughter’s cameras), and am up to almost 30,000 images taken. With each camera, the quality and megapixel count has gone up, and my current store of images amounts to 39 GB–and that just the “keepers” of family photos, and does not include my professional work.

Currently, I use a Canon EOS 20D, which is an 8-megapixel digital SLR. I shoot in RAW+JPEG mode. The JPEG is a small, ready-to-use image file which uses the standard image settings out of the camera. The RAW file preserves all the information directly from the camera sensor and lets me fix it up later on with whatever settings I see fit, adjusting exposure and color in ways that I could not adjust the JPEG file.

The more pictures I have taken, the more I have learned about what makes a good photo, and I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned to my day-to-day shooting. It’s hard to actually try to take well-composed and well-exposed images at the same time you’re trying to capture fleeting moments that will help preserve memories later on. I find that postprocessing is crucial to turn great moments into great photos, and for this I have evolved from straight image-editing pictures to a program called Bibble. The first picture of a train is one that I took on sunny day while I was out with Anna. I really like the picture, but because I had Anna to keep an eye on, I didn’t really think about how the picture was going to be exposed. In particular, there’s a very bright sky, and the train itself is black, which means there’s a heck of a lot of dynamic range in the picture. The first picture is as the camera saved the JPEG file, and although the train is nicely exposed, the sky is completely blown out. Luckily, I was taking the picture in RAW+JPEG mode. The RAW file preserves a lot more of the dynamic range than is represented in the JPEG file, and when I open it in Bibble, I can turn down the exposure by 1.5 stops, and poof, the clouds in the sky are visible. Unfortunately, the train is a big mass of black.

The solution is to produce two images–one exposed for the sky and one for the train, then combine them into a single image in Gimp. Thankfully, most images don’t require this amount of work (even though it only took about five minutes), and Bibble makes short work of adjusting exposure, white balance, and cropping.

Here are a few relevant links:

• Bibble Labs, makers of the Bibble software
• The Raw Truth, a good article about shooting RAW image files.
• Digital Blending, an article about expanding dynamic range with multiple exposures.