Taking pics on vacation (raw v. jpeg)

I am going on vacation to Colorado this Christmas, and I am excited to bring my new T1i and take some great pics on the slopes. My question is, should I take my pics in RAW or jpeg? I have lightroom for post processing but my experience doing so is virtually zero. I imagine I will be taking A LOT of pics, so the thought of processing them all seems daunting...

What do you guys do when you go on vacation or some type of trip where you take a large volume of photos?

I'd go with RAW out of habit. I only shoot JPEG when I know I want to burn a disk quickly afterward and no one will ever process them, including myself.

I shoot all RAW everything because that is the ideal workflow in Lightroom. Plus I'm a lzy person so I like to leave the camera in AWB and just not worry about white balance until I get home.

Canon AWB is pretty good outdoors anyways.

Shoot RAW. Even if your post processing skills aren't up to par now, you can always go back later when you improve.

Raw!

Are there standard aspects that you can mass change on all your photos? Like basically do a small change for all your photos and save them to jpeg, and maybe go back and edit with more detail a couple of dozen images? If so, what types of changes would I be looking to change? And can anyone recommend a good lightroom tutorial?

Sorry for all the questions!

Learn to use the software and I'm sure you will have no problem shooting all raw, all the time. It's worth it if only for the extra room for error.

Cesium wrote in post #8658682
Learn to use the software and I'm sure you will have no problem shooting all raw, all the time. It's worth it if only for the extra room for error.

I definitely need room for error as I am new at this. However, I don't have the hard drive space to permanently keep every picture I take in raw format.

There is no reason for you to keep every picture you take. Start now in being ruthless about deleting images.

In my workflow, I make several passes through a folder of images before I even start processing. The first pass gets rid of OOF and exposures so bad they can't be corrected in post. The second pass eliminates bad compositions and images similar enough to be considered duplicates. On the third run-through I flag the ones I consider worth processing. Only then do I start processing.

During the processing, if I can't achieve a good end result or the processed image doesn't live up to my visualization, I'll either delete it entirely or unflag it and go on to the next image.

You'll find that the more you get into this, you'll start buying more storage space. The cost of large capacity hard drives is coming down all the time and it is possible to find reasonably priced 1 terabyte drives these days.

I personally would shoot in RAW only but if you are new and not sure about processing RAW images, I think shooting in jpg is fine. I'd recommend the largest size jpgs though so if you want to make a relatively large print that it's not a problem.

I would go against the grain and say Jpeg..... but RAW maybe how you want to go if this is your first time shooting with snow as it WILL trick the camera by seeing so much white. Your call at this point.

I've shot JPEG and regretted it plenty of times. I've never regretted shooting RAW. Lightroom makes it so easy to shoot RAW and quickly produce JPEGs when needed, there's little reason not to shoot RAW. The way I look at it, I'm only getting one chance to capture those photons so I'd better get as much data as I can. And as Guapo said above, even if I'm not great at post processing now, I'll always have the raw data to go back to as my skills improve.

barrett14 wrote in post #8658950
I definitely need room for error as I am new at this. However, I don't have the hard drive space to permanently keep every picture I take in raw format.

You can get a 1 TB external drive for under $100.

And only keep the good shots, purge the rest.

Shoot RAW. I see every picture opportunity as one that I would potentially print at 16 x 20 or larger. If the pictures or opportuity to shoot is of so little importance to you, take along a P&S and enjoy the trip.

As mentioned... you do have to get ruthless and delete almost-duplicates, poorly focussed, boring images at the end of the day. A good excuse to buy a Netbook for storage and basic viewing.

My routine is very similar to JWright's. I often go back a month later and delete more.

Once said and done I process only the images that I am going to show/print.

Lightroom is very easy to use, slow as hell, but easy. Shoot raw and just play around with the pics when you get home. Won't take any longer than a day or two before you're comfortable and creating decent images.