So I’ve got a couple of books and I’ve been reading the web on good photography technique. Yesterday I took the evening to shoot a new location - Reservoir Park. Really not that impressive of a park, but there are two very distinctive features that I wanted to shoot. First is the watertower, which is a unique structure that is easily the most phallic object in St. Louis. You’ll understand when you see pictures. The second is the reservoir itself, which stands on a small hill and contained within a 10-foot high wall. I had seen steps leading up to the wall and thought it would be a great photo to shoot across the reservoir. Unfortunately the steps only lead up to the base of the wall. No reservoir shots. In their place, I got some Romanesque-fountain shots and some of an oddly-placed statue. Pics to come.
Speaking of pics, there is a small problem generated by a 6 megapixel camera and a laptop computer. This problem was really brought home when I purchased a 1-gig SD flash memory card for the camera - my camera now has more flash memory than my laptop has RAM. 4 times as much, to be exact. Not really a problem when you’re browsing, editing, and saving 1 or 2 megapixel photos that run, at their highest, 600 or 700 kilobytes. It begins to be a problem when merely browsing (forget editing and saving - real headaches) 6 mexapixel photos that run about 2.2 megabytes each. I had a single folder of photos that was nearly a gigabyte. That was just JPGs. This camera also takes RAW photos, which I really want to start using, which run in the neighborhood of 12-13 megabytes. Each. See, a JPG is the result of the camera doing post-processing and compressing the image produced by the photo-sensor. A RAW file has no compression and no post-processing (and is totally proprietary so only a couple of photo programs can handle a certain camera’s RAW files, unlike JPGs which are fairly eponymous these days), so they are perfect for taking a photo and manipulating it to make it exactly what the artist wants, pixel by pixel. But they’re huge, and there’s no way that 256 meg of RAM is going to let me do it. *Sigh*
