Ok, so I’ve been shooting for about 3 years now, myself and my trusty old 350D. I’ve only recently had the money to buy some extra kit for the stuff that I’m really into – I bought a nice long 70-300mm telephoto and the BG-E3 battery grip (which is pretty much a pre-requisite for timelapses). I’ve also bought a few extra things, such as a thermal  waterproof cover. Of all these things, which have improved my photos (or so I’d like to think) – none have come quite as close as the power of RAW. I’ve only just become aware of the RAW power of RAW recently (read: past three days) and after having shot in JPEG for the last three years without giving much consideration to the file format that is .CR2

After having found out just how much stuff you can do in post-processing when using a RAW file as opposed to a .jpeg truely astounded me. Exposure editing alone is mind blowing how accurate you can get to a decent shot – just about the only thing you can’t do (and you never will be able to do) is control true depth of field.

This shot was just something I took while wanting to play around with RAW as an example, it’s my new mouse (which is a Microsoft Wireless Mouse 7000) and it’s pretty awesome as far as mice go. I fired up the shot into PS and edited a few settings and came out with this, which I actually think is now a pretty nice photo, purely because I like the colours.

From now on all my main shots are going to be done in RAW although I’ll have to keep timelapses in (relatively) small .jpg for space conservation on-location etc.