I took this picture this past October, if the fallen leaves are any indication. I was hiking in northern Indiana with my friend Charles by a small Wabash River tributary called Ross Run, the same day that we encountered the illustrious Senator Patrick.
The area is known locally for the waterfalls that flow through the exposed Silurian bedrock, though on this particular day the waters were very low and the channel choked with fallen leaves. I had been fiddling with settings on my camera as we went, and when I stopped to take a picture of the stream, I didn’t think about it. It looked great through the viewfinder; it was only later that I realized that the exposure setting was way off, and the photo was completely dark.
If I had been shooting in JPEG, the story would be over. We wouldn’t have a picture to look at today, though I suppose I could have picked another. The format is great for many things, especially presenting a final product- but not as a starting point. Due to its compression, which is where the major advantage in file size comes from, all unused information is discarded. In this example, that would have been everything- any adjustment would change the blank black picture to black with artificial purples throughout, which often appear when JPEGs are overexposed.
Since I shot this picture in RAW format, which does not compress files, I was able to adjust the exposure in post-processing to save the image and still produce what I saw and wanted. Then I could convert it to something storage-friendly when ready. And here it is.
The moral of this story for fledgling photographers: if you haven’t already done so, get your camera right now and change the default format to RAW. You can thank me later!
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