Lightroom: Raw vs JPEG or Canada vs US

On Saturday, I went to Reifel before the big downpour. During the week a flock of American Sandhill Cranes flew in. They were 18 of them! The invaders! Reifel is in BC, Canada, here on the Google map

There are local Sandhill cranes that stay the whole year. This summer there was even a colt, a baby Sandhill crane. I’ll post some photos another time. The “Canadian” Sandhill cranes were not happy, they complained:

Yes, they are grooming themselves. They make a lot of noise while they are grooming. It’s one of their way of showing that it’s their territory. The American Sandhill cranes did the same in reply… Looks like the Americans Cranes have invaded Canada to steal the Canadian worms, their main food when seeds are not available.

I was taking my photos and the lady next to meet started screaming:

It’s overexposed! I’ve missed everything!

So I replied:

It’s OK with raw, you can always fix that later.

To which she replied:

I don’t know how to do that, I only use JPEG.

1. She was using a Nikon D300s with a 300mm f/4.
2. You should shoot RAW! Always, because you can “rescue” your photos if you need to. There’s nothing to do, except set it in the camera. The software, whether it’s Lightroom, Nikon’s NX… will deal with any conversion, nothing for you to do.
3. BUT!… The famous but! I sometimes use JPEG because instead of shooting 15 frames at 7 frames per second, I can shot over 60 frames at 7 frames per second when I use JPEG. So there are occasions for JPEG. But that’s the exception to the rule.
4. The second exception to the rule, is “I’m running out of space” and I only have one memory card left…