Travel tips?

[Rahb]

OK, I know it's early, but I'm just trying to prepar. I'm going on a Cruise with a HUGE group of friends in July. Something like 40 people that we know will be going. I'm going to be takigna TON of pictures. I'll have my laptop to upload the images to every night, but I'll be taking a ton. right now I only have a 1gb card, but I'm sure I'll ahvea few more cards by then. Should I shoot in all RAW, or should I stick with JPG? I'm no pro. Right now I'm only shooting in RAW for practice. I doubt it's doing me much good since I'm such a noob at it.

So:

Should I shoot for Quantaty and stay with JPEG

or

Should I shoot with RAW (and why)

The main thing that scares me is having 1000's of images in RAW and having to convert every single one. I know I can Batch process this, but if I do that without spending time on each one......shouldn't I just shoot in jpeg to begin?

Just looking for a point of view really.

[danny25]

I just started shooting RAW and I'm mad I didn't start sooner. Even if you don't do a lot of PP now, you may in the future. I'm looking back on pics I've taken in the past that I could really improve now if only they were RAW files.

[Jay Henley]

What Danny said!!!......You can still shoot quantity with RAW, you just need larger and more flash cards, more memory in computer etc... some people are fine with shooting .jpg but I think most people once they start shooting RAW stay with RAW. With RAW you can change your white balance in post processing if needed. RAW is an uncompressed file similar to tiff file. Others on this forum can give you better details. Go to google.com and search for "RAW advantages" and you will find a lot of info. bottom line is that you are just a lot more limited to what you can do to the photo in photoshop. I went to Redwood forest two years ago and shot all .jpg and have regreted it ever since. RAW does take up a lot of space. I try to only keep my best shots and delete the rest and back up to DVD's that will hold almost 9 gig. The 700 meg CD-R's were killing me. I can get 15 times as much now on one DVD as I could on one CD-R.

[amadjuster]

What kind of camera? The D200 lets you take RAW and JPG at the same time, just have a couple more 1gb cards ,or a 2gb, if you can find one worth the money. I keep finding I can buy 2 - 1gbs for less that a 2gb.