JPEG or RAW

Four friends vie for the best shot of a rising sun.

Ed: Are you shooting RAW for this?

Bert: I don’t do RAW. Too much trouble on this 400D. Slows it right down.

Ed: I hear there’s a good deal on 40Ds at Yodo’s til the end of the month. 20% off.

Bert: Well, I dunno, Ed. RAW’s a lot of trouble to process. Downloading takes a long time. More fiddling in P-Shop. And I hear JPEG isn’t lossy enough to affect 8x10s. And that’s as big as I ever print.

Ed: Aha. Give Picasso a child’s paintbox and he’ll still produce a masterpiece?

Bert: After all the technology, photography just comes down to reading the light.

________

Voiceover

Abbreviations are sometimes acronyms and sometimes not. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. RAW is not an acronym. It simply means what it says. A digital image is just as the camera takes it. Uncompressed. When we speak in techspeak we are sometimes unaware whether we are using abbreviated or compressed expressions or simply using the raw word.

Tech speak is also tossing us a good many other shortened words. “Lossy” meaning compressed data, (antonym “lossless” meaning uncompressed). Sprinkling these words in your speech, unglossed, is used by some to give the impression that they know the field.

Ed, however, is not out to crow. He knows a cheap camera can still take good pictures in the hands of someone who knows what he is doing. He knows Bert’s skill level. And Bert hits the nail on the head with his closing “…reading the light.”