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Author Topic: No need of RAW !!!  (Read 24533 times)

Rob C

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No need of RAW !!!
« Reply #80 on: December 14, 2007, 02:37:57 pm »

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I have a number of clients for whom I provide the conversions and have the profles fro all of the local printers (90% of my work is printed here).  Thats how I want it to work for everyone.  Sadly there are a growing number of "peers" willing to give the farm away...these guys don't even charge the client a capture fee and give the raws at no charge.

In a market that is getting tighter ( I work for RV and Marine clients) and sales slowing, more and more of the customers are buying photography like they buy hamber...how much a pound.  It's not a good sign.
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Craig

I have no idea how old you are or even how long you have been in business, but I have to say this: your experiences with RAW, printers et al are nothing new because clients have always been difficult creatures if in different ways.

Quality is not always their primary consideration either: I once went to see an art director in an attempt to introduce my work to his agency; he already knew me, to an extent, by reputation and having seen my stuff here and there. Well, after looking through my portfolio, he said ´lovely work, Rob, but we use so-and-so.´ I asked why not give me a shot too, and the reply was that though my stuff was better, so-and-so was a lot cheaper. This wasn´t any little design shop - this was Glasgow´s biggest advertising agency with mega clients and million-pound listings. And the point here is this: it all happened in the late 60s!  There is nothing new in clients wanting to find cheaper options, they always will and that will continue, now  in the world of pixels as earlier in the worlds of transparencies and hard prints!

To lose clients by standing on your principles is not always the way to fly: you have to be pragmatic in life, as I´m sure you must have found for yourself, and for people to seek help from, or rely on any trade - oops! professional association that´s connected with photography to solve business problems is not going to bring a lot of joy. Now, were we talking about medical, law or similar societies, then yes, expect real advance and advantage. But photography? Very amusing!

To return to your conclusion: yes, to many people it IS just like buying burgers.

Sadly, Rob C

Craig Lamson

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No need of RAW !!!
« Reply #81 on: December 14, 2007, 08:32:10 pm »

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Craig

I have no idea how old you are or even how long you have been in business, but I have to say this: your experiences with RAW, printers et al are nothing new because clients have always been difficult creatures if in different ways.

Quality is not always their primary consideration either: I once went to see an art director in an attempt to introduce my work to his agency; he already knew me, to an extent, by reputation and having seen my stuff here and there. Well, after looking through my portfolio, he said ´lovely work, Rob, but we use so-and-so.´ I asked why not give me a shot too, and the reply was that though my stuff was better, so-and-so was a lot cheaper. This wasn´t any little design shop - this was Glasgow´s biggest advertising agency with mega clients and million-pound listings. And the point here is this: it all happened in the late 60s!  There is nothing new in clients wanting to find cheaper options, they always will and that will continue, now  in the world of pixels as earlier in the worlds of transparencies and hard prints!

To lose clients by standing on your principles is not always the way to fly: you have to be pragmatic in life, as I´m sure you must have found for yourself, and for people to seek help from, or rely on any trade - oops! professional association that´s connected with photography to solve business problems is not going to bring a lot of joy. Now, were we talking about medical, law or similar societies, then yes, expect real advance and advantage. But photography? Very amusing!

To return to your conclusion: yes, to many people it IS just like buying burgers.

Sadly, Rob C
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Well Rob I've been doing stuff my entire adult life and I'm 54..just about to be 55.  My business is 10 years old.

The problem I have with lowering myself is that once you climb down, you are just never going to climb back up.  It works that way on price or quality.  One has to decide just what is important.  After all of these years I'm just not sure I want to become a bottom  feeder.  Sure there is cash available but at what "personal" cost?  It would be very easy to get rid of the 10,000 square foot studio and all of the big hot lights and just carry around 6 or 8 Alien Bees in the trunk of my car...just like the guys who are beating up my market right now.  However thats just not me.

I'm convinced that digital is a blessing and a curse.  Back in the day when everyone demanded 4x5  or 120 chromes the clients had no problem paying a true professional.  Now, just like in the first days of desktop publishing, everyone has a d40 ans is a "photographer".  Oh well, such is the changing nature of life...

I've some very important decisions to make real soon.!
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astanley

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« Reply #82 on: December 15, 2007, 03:14:40 pm »

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For those of us that strive to get the very best rendering out of the very best shots, there simply is no argument.  Yet there are popular websites whose authors dismiss RAW as an unnecessary complication or worse....and a lot of novices believe them, and keep asking the question.

Mike Coffey
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Mike,

There is a far more insidious clan I've come across - the "Why shoot JPEG?  If you are a good photographer, you don't need the power and flexibilty RAW gives you"

Frankly, those people have probably never worked in a darkroom... and it scares me when I see people talk like that.

Cheers,

-Andrew
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jjj

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No need of RAW !!!
« Reply #83 on: December 18, 2007, 10:45:03 pm »

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You're entitled to that opinion even if I disagree.
Thanks so much for pointing that out!
How long you've been using Raw or your recommendations is immaterial to the points you still don't get.
No one said this was so, why do you feel you need to move away from the topic at hand and introduce such nonsensical statements.
This hasn't, nor shouldn't be a discussion about aesthetes. It's about a technical point you dismiss or fail to recognize.
Pointless to THIS discussion. If you had a Raw and a JPEG, we could discuss apples and apples.
Whatever blows your skirt up.
I am but once again, you've gone way OT not to express a point but to camouflages any desire to stay on track about a technical dissuasion here.
Again, a lot of writing that is totally immaterial to THIS post. As such, I suspect you either 'don't get it' or don't want to. Until you can stay on topic, I'm going to have to assume both.
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I suggest you go back to school and redo English comprehension.
You simply dismiss anything counter to your viewpoint as irrelevent or off topic, usually as you never seem to read posts in context. You seem to be ignorant about the very varying abilities of working pros and God know why you think the photographer always knows best. Quite a few of the ones I know [experienced and doing quite very well for themselves] are pretty clueless about RAW and many other technical things, they are photographers and not software geeks/scientist types like you are.  I meet up regularly with other working pros in my city and half of them hate the techy/software crap. They pay someone to calibrate their monitors as they do not have the time or inclination to learn about such things as guess what, they are too busy taking photographs.

I tend to spend very little time on internet forums as I get really fed up with idiots not reading posts properly before responding. LL is useful for tecnical knowledge and is usually free of such types, but you seem to be the exception here. Plus you are so absolute about things, when quite frankly only a fool is absolute about humans and human behaviour. You should stick to pixel peeping, where being exact is a useful attribute.
The fact that you dismiss aethetics show how little you understand, as that is the absolute bottom line. Besides, getting the very best technical quality is not always the most important thing. As if it was, no-one would use anythng other than say a Hasselblad 39M camera or a 10x8 film camera. Any camera less perfect than the very best camera is a degradation in quality by comparison. Just like a JPEG is not as good qulity as a RAW file.

As an aside, even after calibrating the colours in ACR/LR,  JPEGs out of the camera still have a slight edge in pleasing colour rendition on skin tones, in certain lighting conditions. And that is actually more important in many respects than being able to recover highlights or see into the shadows. Personally I quite like black shadows and will happily sacrifice the detail there if need be. A colour chart calibration is noticably better than no calibration, but still not always quite there with skin tones. And for some shots I may well use the JPEG if it looks nicer. And looking nicer is the most important thing.
I think the problem with colour chart calibration is that you may need to do it with each lighting situation, which is not always practical and somewhat impossible to do with shoots already done.
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jjj

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No need of RAW !!!
« Reply #84 on: December 18, 2007, 10:55:26 pm »

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Frankly, those people have probably never worked in a darkroom... and it scares me when I see people talk like that.
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Lots of very good photographers have never worked in a darkroom. Lots of pros used to have darkroom specialists to do their printing for them. Does that make them any less a photographer? Being able to capture the moment is quite different from having the patience to dodge and burn with bits of card or to use PS/ACR properly.
 I was reading about one of the great photographers, like Avedon or someone of his stature/age [annoyingly I forget who now], saying that he now uses digital, but he has an assistant to do all the computer stuff as he wasn't that interested.
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jjj

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« Reply #85 on: December 18, 2007, 11:11:08 pm »

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To return to your conclusion: yes, to many people it IS just like buying burgers.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=160691\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
And like the many who think a MacWhopper is good food, far fewer people appreciate a better quality organic burger. Just like far fewer people can seen the point in the using RAW over JPEGs. As they think JPEGs are more than good enough.
Heck, look at the success of iTunes, selling people a lower quality product than they were used to, yet which they think is great = oodles of cash.
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