Yuleblog of terrible photography

We are all snobs, I suppose. Most entry and advanced cameras have a green setting on the dial or menu called P, or A+ or something similar, which essentially lets you have the camera shoulder the burden and run off acceptable settings that should prevent you from completely ruining the photo from a settings point of view. I confess I have never used this setting. Not sure why - probably a mixture of vanity and belief that the camera would not really have a way of knowing what effect or style I was after. Always assuming I knew it myself of course. Oddly enough, once I got a decent camera (the Canon EOS M50 APS-C that I had for a couple of years before trading it in for something newer and finer) I started really reading the manuals and watching Youtube videos with smart photographers who could explain why they chose one setting over another. Plenty of controversy there but at least it does give you an idea of where you want to compromise - maybe you can live with high ISO if the camera is modern and your post-processing software is good - or is a longer exposure time or a wider aperture a better way to go? Or a little of each perhaps? Two shots with different settings and then merge the images? Mostly calls for you to carry a tripod around, also a compromise of sorts.

I mostly shoot landscapes, woodland and street / city. I like reflective surfaces but I also like leaves and branches. I probably over-rely on aperture priority and increasingly also manual, maybe couples with auto-ISO. Seems that things can’t go terribly wrong that way. At least if you make a habit of shooting in RAW. I rarely also do JPG but this is down to two points really. First, I take many more pictures than I end up processing and JPG is a scaled down version of the end product with me. If I need it straight out of camera then a Canon EOS R6 or similar will produce a JPG on the fly to transmit to your phone and social media can be fed on the road if needs be. Usually it doesn’t need to be.

A thing I enjoy about the Canon R6 mkII -though a lot of other cameras offer this too - is the dual memory slots. I save as RAW on both cards. Card I is for formating once I have transferred the images to the PC while Card II just keeps running as a backup until it is full, so there is somewhere to go back to in case I really mess up my backup routines.

I think my file workflow may be a little unusal but I am not sure. You can be the judge. As soon as I return home I power up the PC and transfer the RAW files from the camera and reformat Card I. I then go through the RAW files using a free utility from Faststone (https://www.faststone.org) and delete the worst of the shots, it may be the majority of them. My photo editing programme is Luminar (purchase not sub) and I like version 3 better than version 4. Admittedly Luminar is quite slow but I am largely happy with it, at least on a powerful enough PC. I store and keep these RAW files on external HDDs so that I can re-edit later if I want. Final products I save as TIFFs and then reduce down to JPG. My JPGs go on Google Photos, partly as a backup and partly as a way of finding the file numbers later if I want to redo them for some reason. Might become better at editing or might try out new software.

Not sure I have a lot to contribute but here is the workflow and setup that I think works for me. I tend to make myself an annual photobook - I use the TIFFs for that, usually don’t bother going back to RAWs there unless I see that I have made poor choices the first time round.

Thank you for checking in and let me know what works for you. Lightroom seems to be very much what everyone uses but it hasn’t appealed to me and I don’t really like adobe subscriptions.