RAW or JPEG

WoW---monster truck Porsche--Awesome !!

personally, I would take quite a few 2 to 4 GB. cards. They are cheap, and you won't have dedicated all of your pics to, let's say just a couple of 8GB cards, just an example.
So if you have all your shots on big cards, and one of those cards goes bad or whatever, you lose more shots taken. Go for the nitty-gritty, shoot RAW!

Shoot jpeg and process in the raw editor of CS3....I love it. I shot raw for 2 years..never again.

Quick Question (I hope!):
If you shoot RAW + JPEG, do you choose large fine for JPEG, or a different JPEG setting? RAW + large fine JPEG on my 5D eats up a lot of CF space. And... a lot of disk space as well.
Thanks, hoping this is not an inane question here.
John

john-in-japan wrote in post #6010714
Quick Question (I hope!):
If you shoot RAW + JPEG, do you choose large fine for JPEG, or a different JPEG setting? RAW + large fine JPEG on my 5D eats up a lot of CF space. And... a lot of disk space as well.
Thanks, hoping this is not an inane question here.
John

If I had choice, I'd choose the best. Why bother having it at all if you're just going to degrade it?

Reminds me of when I could never convince my boss to even shoot full 6mp res with his camera because it ate up too much card space... but when I helped him pick it out, it HAD to be a 6mp camera at the time, and later always complained when he couldn't crop his photos hardly and get a good print.

If concerned about card-space shoot raw only and see my earlier post if you need .jpgs.

Well John, I think it's going to boil down to how much space you are willing to give up and how much data you want to work with. JPEG, personally I would use the highest quality( if you get the shot "right" in the camera, ETTR, then you(this is hard to say) won't (cough) even(cough cough) need (cough) RAW. That being said, RAW gives you that extra POWER(data) to play with!

ah crap, David beat me to it!

Thanks!
I anticipated the answer and am grateful for it. Never thought of RAW (cough!) being a back up for the perfect JPEG! I am finding that after I process the RAW and convert them to TIFF or JPEG, I can discard the JPEGs that are straight out of the camera or shoot them over to an external hard drive. But putting that full 8GB card in the slot does make my computer hum a bit. I can grab a coffee and go out for lunch, and most of the time when I get back, the photos are in a folder. Sheeeesh!
Again thanks,
John

hahaha, that's funny I'm scared to use that big of card in case of potential data loss, I like to spread em out over some 2's and 4's for safety, that's just me though!
Now, of coarse, if I was shooting 21mp shots, I'd have a bunch of 8's!

RAW!

I had shot JPG for the first couple of years of DLSR-ing, and now I wish I had alot of those older shots in RAW because I'm much more adept at post-processing (and Bridge/ACR/Photoshop is much more versatile than Picassa )

john-in-japan wrote in post #6010988
But putting that full 8GB card in the slot does make my computer hum a bit. I can grab a coffee and go out for lunch, and most of the time when I get back, the photos are in a folder. Sheeeesh!

sounds like its time to grab a firewire card reader ..

Bobster wrote in post #6012435
sounds like its time to grab a firewire card reader ..

Agree... Although that would cut your lunch time back considerably

As for the jpg size: Depends on what you want to use the jpg for; For instance: A photographer I work for sometimes shoots Raw + jpg, and uses the jpg to print a "polaroid" (old skool ) on a Selphy printer. small is fine for that.

john-in-japan wrote in post #6010988
I can grab a coffee and go out for lunch, and most of the time when I get back, the photos are in a folder. Sheeeesh!
Again thanks,
John

And, that is why when people say memory is cheap, I always think time isn't. It takes time to work with RAW, it takes time to get the shot right. I'd rather shoot than process at home.

In addition, when I come home with 500 shots, I don't need to spend time to "Save" one, I've got others to choose from.

I guess everyone has a different way to get the same outcome, just depends if you specialize in graphic arts or photography.