Local Press Photographer's Day - Part Four...

Some notes on cameras and settings...
My typical set-up:

A pair of company D300's, shooting Jpegs, Normal Quality (about 3.5Mb files), full size (12mp), Adobe RGB, Nikon's Picture Control on “Standard”, but with the contrast and saturation turned down and the sharpening up by one notch each. There was a point where I felt BigPaper’s processes weren’t putting enough unsharp mask on for the presses, hence the increased default sharpening. Both bodies have also got their default Matrix exposures increased by 0.3 stop using the fine-tuning. The D300 seems to be set slightly “dark” for my taste. I have the histogram and Highlight Warning blinkies set to On, and check these for exposure. A white collar, say, "blinking" is normally of no worry to me. A face doing it means trouble: adjustments are made...

Exposure is usually via aperture priority with compensation as needed, though I do swap modes occasionally if I want a particular shutter speed held; for example, I have been known to use Program in the summer - I use the auto-FP High Speed sync on my flashes by default, but if you need every last Watt of power (summer sun fill-flash), then Program mode won’t let the shutter speed rise over the “normal” max-sync 1/250th unless it absolutely has to, and it’s quicker to just click in and out of P than faff back and forth...

I usually try to work through the day on one body, so it keeps the downloading of the cards simple and jobs aren’t spread across multiple cards. If I need two, I’ll use two, though.

For sport, or if I know there is going to be bugger-all or very difficult lighting, I nearly always pick one of my personal pair of D3 bodies (I know, lucky ...!), set to shoot raw to one card and Normal Quality Jpeg to the other. Colour Space, file size and Picture Control are all set as the D300 bodies, though I usually use the raws so it’s really of no consequence. The D3 and D300 share the same AF hardware, but, like others have reported, I find it works better in the D3. It may have something to do with the extra processing power available to the D3, and also that the focus points don't extend so far into the darker "edges" of the frame.

Again, you might be interested to know that both D3 bodies have +0.16 stop exposure dialed in via the fine-tune. I usually don’t dial it out unless I get a lot of highlight warning blinkies, again because I normally go to the raw. This sometimes "sacrifices" the Jpeg, and I reckon I'll stop shooting those on D3 eventually. Both D3 bodies are typically on Manual for sport, with the actual exposure value being set by the excellent Auto-ISO, and usually Aperture Priority for anything else.

With Jpegs you can’t go too mad in post-processing, so the best practice of getting good basic exposure and framing in-camera still applies.  With raws there is scope to do more, which is why I will use my D3s when I know there is likely to be trouble. To be honest, I do it for practice too - I think the raw workflow will be one we all go to eventually. The advantage of raw is you can defer some of your shooting decisions until after the event, especially if you are working in a tearing hurry in difficult circumstances.  The downside of raw is bigger files that take longer to import, that all need adjusting, and then take longer to export as Jpegs.  

My normal workflow for raws is through Apple Aperture 3, so I skip the Photo Mechanic stage, doing tagging, captioning, cropping and adjusting in just the one program. I run through the images and ones I like get one star, then I look at the "one stars" and make a final selection, these getting upgraded to three stars, so they stand out. I sort out the captions, and then Adjust; I keep a set of Aperture presets that I know work for me, like curves, highlight recovery, sharpening and such, so I can hit a preset for quickness and then tweak it for the individual picture. Aperture exports the edited pics as Jpegs, again about 1.8 - 2.0 mb. Now I do go back into Photo Mechanic, but just to use its FTP facility to send the images out. I used to use Lightroom for the raws too, but I definitely believe Aperture 3 makes a much better job of rendering raw images the way I think they should look. I understand Adobe has improved its raw profiles in the latest ACR and Lightroom 3 but, for now, I haven’t coughed up for the upgrade from 2 to 3. 

Next: And finally, some of the pictures from the day...