{"id":21546,"date":"2014-01-20T06:54:54","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T13:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=21546"},"modified":"2014-01-20T06:54:54","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T13:54:54","slug":"displaying-yellow-headed-blackbird-and-revisiting-raw-vs-jpeg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/20\/displaying-yellow-headed-blackbird-and-revisiting-raw-vs-jpeg\/","title":{"rendered":"Displaying Yellow-headed Blackbird (and revisiting RAW vs JPEG)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The purpose of this post is two-fold – to feature some interesting blackbird behavior and to demonstrate why I always shoot in RAW instead of JPEG.<\/p>\n

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\"yellow<\/a><\/p>\n

These images, taken in June of 2008, are some of my earliest bird photographs and my inexperience shows but I’ll get into that later.\u00a0 I found this adult male Yellow-headed Blackbird at Farmington Bay and he was in fine form as he performed his incessant and raucous display.<\/p>\n

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\"yellow-headed<\/a><\/p>\n

In Spring males of the species display almost constantly for a variety of reasons and the behavior is complex and varied.\u00a0 In fact 13 different displays have been identified by behaviorists.<\/p>\n

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\"yellow-headed<\/a><\/p>\n

This bird kept his eye on me through the process but didn’t let my presence interfere with his performance in the least.<\/p>\n

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\"yellow-headed<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s almost like they can’t help themselves.\u00a0 You can tell the display is coming because their body begins to spasm (for lack of a better word), a few choked notes come out and then the full display plays out as if it is programmed and cannot be interrupted.<\/p>\n

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\"yellow-headed<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the posture they often (though not always) end up in.\u00a0 Then they typically look around for a few seconds before it begins all over again, with variations.\u00a0 It’s fascinating to watch and to listen to, although after a while I’ll admit that the discordant call can eventually\u00a0become monotonous.<\/p>\n

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For the first few months I was photographing birds I was shooting in JPEG instead of Raw and these images are examples of that shortsightedness on my part.\u00a0 My heart literally sinks whenever I run across some of those early JPEG\u00a0images that\u00a0I want to use.\u00a0 For me, processing them is a nightmare because my options without the RAW editor are more limited and my skills are now attuned to editing in RAW.\u00a0 And it’s ironic that my early JPEG images (taken before I knew much of anything about photography) were often exposed poorly so they need\u00a0the processing power available in RAW even more than my later shots do.<\/p>\n

If you hadn’t picked up on it before, notice the color variations in the backgrounds of these images.\u00a0 Those colors should be consistent but due to my mediocre exposure and my lack of processing\u00a0skills in JPEG they are not.\u00a0 There are other\u00a0issues with these images as well that I could have better corrected in the RAW editor.<\/p>\n

I’m not trying to start the RAW\u00a0vs. JPEG war all over again.\u00a0 Some folks shoot in JPEG and\u00a0swear by it and that’s fine.\u00a0 All I’m saying is that I sure wish I hadn’t waited so long to switch over.\u00a0 And whenever novice photographers ask me about the subject, my advice is always the same – start shooting RAW now.\u00a0 The longer you wait the more you’re likely to regret it.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The purpose of this post is two-fold – to feature some interesting blackbird behavior and to demonstrate why I always shoot in RAW instead of JPEG.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,391,897],"tags":[1839,397,1434,899,898],"class_list":["post-21546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-nesting-and-mating","category-yellow-headed-blackbirds","tag-displaying","tag-farmington-bay","tag-jpeg-vs-raw","tag-xanthocephalus-xanthocephalus","tag-yellow-headed-blackbird"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/yellow-headed-blackbird-9599-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-5Bw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}