Questions from MirrorlessPhotoTips

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

There are a couple of questions I frequently see in e-mails that I think are important enough to answer in a blog post.

Question: Do you post process the images on this blog and social media sites like Facebook and Instagram?

Mark: Yes, they have almost all had some post processing done to them. I shoot almost all of my images in the RAW format. When you shoot using RAW the camera does not apply sharpening, noise and other corrections that it does to a JPEG file. Just like when I shot film I want to be able to apply my own look to all of the images that I shoot. Most of the images you see from me have been sharpened slightly, had contrast added and color corrected to add more warmth.

I worked in the photo processing industry for 30 years and almost every negative had some correction done to it. SOOC (straight out of the camera) makes no sense to me. The original image is a starting point for me to make it my original creation.

Question: Why is it that your photos from the same camera model look sharper than mine?

Mark: I’m not totally sure of the answer without seeing an image but I suspect that your shutter speed may have been too low. Most of the time when somebody sends me an image complaining about lack of sharpness and I look at the EXIF data I can see that the shutter speed was low causing a slight image blur—it’s not out of focus.

Image stabilization is wonderful but you still have to keep an eye on the shutter speed. Image stabilization makes up for your movement, not the subject’s. I always choose shutter speed over aperture if I want the image to be sharp.