Shooting jpeg only, that was nerve racking!

I have always shot raw. From day 1 to now, always raw. Sometimes I will have a combo of raw/jpeg for a quick showing of an image, but raw is always there. So today I was shooting a dance performance and it was going to be fast moving, really fast moving between all the various performers. There was no way my camera was going to be able to keep up. I always new the answer, but didn't want to acknowledge it - shoot jpeg! As the final minutes clicked down I dialed in my white balance, tested my exposure and retested until it was time. In my favor, no changing of the lighting, full on blasting sunlight the whole time.

It was completely the right decision. Things were moving so fast there was no way the camera could have kept up otherwise. The images turned out great, and all the fretting to make sure I had everything dead on right paid off. What really seemed to work for me, came up with this nugget of knowledge on the spot and went with it, was to take some frame filling shots of the grass from my shooting location using the shutter and aperture I wanted and then dialing in the histogram using my ISO so that I had a perfect histogram of the grass peaking dead center. Sure there is some blowing out on the skin from the dead overhead full sun and the girls were sweating hard, but it was a perfect balance between being able to see in the shadows and the blow outs are to be expected.

In the end, I put a new tool in my tool bag and reduced my fear to shoot straight jpeg. However, when I was done it felt so good to put my camera back in raw.

Feel free to share you own experience like this.

Looks like you did a great job,never had to shoot jpeg to speed the shooting up but i do sort of use it sometimes at family get together's where there will be more images than i want to bother with.

My system is set the camera up for how i want jpegs,then shoot raw and download into View nx,the raw images show using the incamera jpeg settings,if ime happy i just save out from those if not i still have a raw file for Adobe.

There are so many times I could just shoot JPEGs and it would be prefect BUT I just can't bring myself to do it. I have conditioned myself to shoot RAW for so long now.

If there was an easy and peasy way to do jpegs like RAWs in 'shop and bridge, I'd honestly shoot a good bit of my misc thing that way too, but alas. NOT doing anything one by one by one by one anymore.

Just shows that jpeg has its uses. I've never hated jpeg, (not that i use it) but say that in front of purists and i'd get shot. You can still edit the images in Lightroom and come out with great results. I've not looked into it, but i imagine jpeg images be better for things like Snapbridge (if you're into that)

SkvLTD said:

If there was an easy and peasy way to do jpegs like RAWs in 'shop and bridge, I'd honestly shoot a good bit of my misc thing that way too, but alas. NOT doing anything one by one by one by one anymore.

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You could select the files you want to work on in Bridge then export them all at once to Adobe Camera Raw (right-click "Open in Camera Raw") and batch process them in ACR.
I do that frequently.

Shhhhh.
Please keep it a secret, but there's some of us who have only ever shot jpegs.
And the sky has not fallen on my head............yet!

Horoscope Fish said:

You could select the files you want to work on in Bridge then export them all at once to Adobe Camera Raw (right-click "Open in Camera Raw") and batch process them in ACR.
I do that frequently.

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I know, but sadly my old laptop can't pull full loads like I'd like to, so I have to do it in batches. Oftentimes though, if whole even or shoot was under the same lighting, a preset does it just fine for 95% of the shots.

Jpeg files are less forgiving, but if you do things right, no problems. My Dad only shot jpeg, and his images looked great.

Nice series.
Sometimes I use the grass to get a reading as well.

I shot the last 2 weeks of days jpeg+RAW. I cant get comfortable with jpeg agian. (I was a hardliner JPEG Fan).

This photo looks in jpeg pretty much same



This photo I couldn't get right in jpeg, even when I tried pp. So I used the RAW file.



My conclusion: I feel much more comfortable shooting RAW. Honestly, I don't safe time shooting jpeg, cos I try to pp as well. If I have to import from my cam to my smartphone jpeg is the way. On the phone I have LR as well if I need to pp a bit.

Maybe one of these days I will figure out the editing software, and I, too, can shoot in RAW.

Thank you to everyone sharing there thoughts experience with shooting, or not shooting jpeg. As previously mentioned, jpegs are not as forgiving, but if you really mind what you're doing it does work. And in my case for the fast pace of the dance performance only the D500/D5 would have kept up. The D500 in in the future, but not at this moment.