Well, time caught up with me and I had my first major disaster and there is just no return from this problem nor any fix in sight. Oh, I have solved the problem but the results won’t change. When I got my new backup camera and set up all the internal settings, somehow or another one setting was not set correctly. So for the last month and a half, including all of my shots of Prince of Wales and my return visit to Anan Creek, I was shooting the WRONG resolution. What a disaster.
Canon, in their infinite wisdom has given the consumer the ability to shoot RAW images, or sRAW or smaller RAW images. I normally set my camera to shoot RAW plus a small jpg so that when I look at the setting, there is the symbol for RAW with an S to represent the small jpg also being captured. When you set it correctly, the S is sitting on top of the RAW symbol. When you set the camera to shoot sRAW, the S is sitting in front of the RAW symbol. Guess which one I set it to. The wrong one.
So, what exactly does this mean to the project?
I will be able to use probably 85% of the shots I took. I will loose the ability to use around 15% of the shots that were not exactly perfect but when shooting large RAW would be acceptable because you scale down the larger RAW down to what you want to use. For the tech geeks, a large RAW is around 3880 pixels wide. For my project, I shrink these images down to 1920 pixels wide. WHY? It hides any small flaws. That is why I foresee losing around 15% of my images because I won’t be able to shrink these particular images down and ‘save’ them. Also, sRAW uses less data and tends to have more noise in the images, especially in the dark shadow areas and so all the black bears I have been shooting are going to have flaws. But the worst thing is all the images I won’t use on the DVD project won’t be really acceptable for use in any photo stock market. Oh, for the internet or small brochures, maybe, but all the images I recently took at ANAN over a two day period won’t be acceptable to print any larger than a 3×5. I could die over this. What a major setback. No. I won’t go back and do this section again. Yes. I could have gone back when I finally caught this problem and returned to Anan for another few days but that would have taken me three days to go back, the two there, and three days to get back to where I started. That would set me back another week. So I decided to push on. Save what I can. And deal with this later. But still, it makes me absolutely sick.
So with the resolution setting back to regular size RAW images, and after a day of deep depression, I am back up and running, in Petersburg about to head out, and have forgiven myself for such a blunder. I can only imagine how much cussing I will do when I go to edit these images and start kicking out the ones that now won’t make the cut. And what promise those images may have had before this disaster… but life must go on. I just hope no one is around when I edit and go back and forth between this problem again and again…
Till I can get online again. R
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