 What? I didn't know I did that. Or do I feel silly? My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. It was time to follow my passion. Come along on my journey to become the best black and white photographer I can be. Whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures. In hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is brightening the edge. Boy, do I feel silly. Now all my cameras have this feature that I didn't realize was there. Basically because I don't shoot in JPEG very often. I knew my camera had a monochrome setting and I've played with it just a little bit. But what I did know is if you click one more to the right, there's a whole other set of adjustments. And there's a set of filters that you can apply to your image when you're taking the picture. So I can add a yellow filter or a red filter, that kind of thing. I didn't know that was there. But in fairness to me, I guess, I've been shooting raw so I haven't really considered that an option. I don't shoot JPEG. But today we're going to shoot JPEG. We're going to try this out, see if it's something that I'm going to be doing out in the field. And we're going to be doing it here on the Oregon coast. So I'm setting up a shot, kind of following this water off to the rocks and out to the ocean. I'm not in love with it, but I need to photograph something starting to rain. Try a couple of different filter settings. Shot one, I think, into yellow and one with red. The clouds behind have some interesting texture, so we can see if I can pull out a little bit of the... I'm also doing multiple exposures, just like you would if anything, where I'm worried about dynamic range. Since I am shooting JPEGs, I'm going to go ahead and also bracket my exposures to see which one or which number of them work best. I hate putting frames together, but I also am shooting RAW, so if I don't like the JPEGs, I have the RAW version as well. So I understand the benefits of shooting RAW. I mean, that's why I do it. Since I'm primarily shooting for black and white, is RAW overkill? I mean, I couldn't find this online. I've been looking around, but I couldn't find anywhere where it talks about how much information you need for these files. Is JPEG good enough? I mean, we don't need RGB. We don't need tones. We don't need individual colors. So there's a lot less information needed for black and white. So maybe RAW is overkill and JPEGs are good enough. I kind of really want to answer that question. That's kind of what I'm doing here, is trying to figure out are JPEGs good enough for black and white? Because we tend to throw away a bunch of information anyway. If I can get an image in camera closer to what I need, then maybe I should just be shooting JPEG. We'll see. You can see that bright sun behind me. It's really kind of making it difficult. But I do like how the water is reflecting the light. So it gives that little bit of a curve out to the ocean. Just wish that cloud would tone down the sun just a little bit. We have a minus tide here today. So I'm able to shoot some of my favorite stuff, tide pools and rocks. It's a good subject matter for black and white. We've been getting quite a bit of rain, so kind of putting gear away when it just rains really hard. I'm going to see if I can't make a shot right here. So now we're shooting back this direction. I think this is going to work better. We've got blue sky, interesting texture in the clouds. And for a second there, I'm just shooting a real simple composition of this rock here. But nice side light. It's adding a lot of texture. Really pretty good subject for black and white. Nice sand texture in front of it. Very simple bit. I don't know what it is, something that has attracted me to this specific rock. You know how it is. Something kind of grabs you. Something gets you in the gut. Just take the picture. Don't worry about it later. Something really cool about the beach is you can go to the same spot over and over again. And it just looks different. The sand changes, the tide changes. Everything is, the light is different. I shot a photo that I really like from this location. I think I was shooting that rock over there. And now I'm shooting this rock. It wasn't here last time I was here. And it's a totally different composition. It looks pretty cool. It's quite a bit different. Similar but different. Like I said, I think I was shooting another rock. It was more exposed. This rock wasn't here. But I really like this round shape that this rock is in. Leading to the next one. It's circled in the water. Kind of got a double going on. Then we got some pretty good clouds behind it. So this shot might work. I think I'm going to do this with a red filter. See what that does to the sky. What I've done is I've just moved in front of this little pool here. And focusing more on these patterns in the sand leading off to this next pool. It's pretty cool. It's amazing how many compositions you can get in such a small area. The conditions are actually pretty good right now. If I don't get a good shot, it's on me for sure. Pretty good light. I love this minus tide situation. Gets me a chance to play with these shapes, these reflections. We don't have a lot of wind. So that's pretty nice too. All in all, it's turning out to be a pretty darn good hour of photography. Unfortunately, we're going to have to hit the road pretty soon. So I'm going to get a few more shots. Looks like the sun's going to be choked out by the clouds on the horizon. See if I can't make a few more compositions before I get out of here. Well, it's time for me to do a wrap up and share how I feel this little experiment went with shooting JPEG for black and white. And by now you've seen the images. What do you think? How'd they turn out? I was surprised at how well the JPEG files edited. It really shouldn't surprise me that much because I shot JPEG for years and years exclusively. I just forgot how much information was actually there, how editable those files can be if you shoot them right. So I'll go over my camera settings one more time. Pretty simple. I had my camera set to three on sharpen and zero and everything else. Contrast, clarity. Then I was experimenting with the filter simulations. Yellow, red, orange. If I was going to do something different, and next time I go out and I shoot in the monochrome setting in JPEG, I'm going to set the sharpening even down to zero because I think it was actually probably sharper than I wanted. I think it worked fine for these images. They didn't need to be spot sharpened. There wasn't anything that, it weren't really over sharpened, but they were pretty much to the limit. I wouldn't want to be sharper. The freedom to sharpen my images to taste. Sometimes I just want a specific area in the frame sharpened, so I didn't realize how much sharpening was applied because I just don't shoot like this very often. So in the future, I'm just going to set my sharpen to zero and try that and see how it works. I won't be going above three. That would be too much, I think. But I was very pleased with the amount of information, even in the JPEGs that I had to work with. I think it worked out pretty well. All the images from this shoot were all, and all my images really, were edited with Affinity Photo and SilverFX Pro 2. It's a plugin I use for converting to black and white or editing images in black and white. I kind of go between the two, just depending on what I'm trying to do. And in that workflow, these files worked great. I had no trouble with the dynamic range, which I'm surprised. Again, I'm surprised. There was a couple scenes that I think in RAW they would be fine, but in JPEG I really didn't have a lot of hope for them. I was quite pleased to see that you can really, there's still a lot of information in the darker areas that you can bring out as long as you protect the highlights. It's amazing how much darkness can be pulled out of those files. Now, I was shooting RAW as well, but all the images on this video will be the JPEG images. I didn't even go into the RAW. I didn't need to. The files had plenty of information. So that really did answer a question for me is, in black and white, do I really need to shoot RAW? Like I said before in the video, I couldn't find that information online. Everything is based around color photography. And I had this suspicion that if I'm shooting black and white, I'm not going to need as much information. It just eliminates a step going from RAW, having to process the RAW image and then starting basically where my JPEGs are. So it just speeds up the process. And it gets me, because I can see the back of the LCD, what I'm doing with the filters and stuff and having how much contrast is being added to the sky and it's kind of a nice tool to have out in the field. I'm surprised I haven't been doing that more. I thought I was in fine just shooting it in color and I'd recognize an image that would probably look good in black and white. But it's so much quicker when you have the black and white image on the back of your camera. You take the picture and you're going to go, oh, this isn't working or oh, this is really good. Or maybe I try a filter to enhance some quality in the scene. I'm kind of looking forward to getting out into the forested areas and trying some of those filters on some of the black and white on the foliage and see how well that works. For myself, I plan on continuing this way of shooting. I think it really works well. But for now, I'm going to shoot both RAW and JPEG. And if I'm having trouble editing the JPEG, I can always pull out the RAW file. But I was so pleased with how quickly I was getting to what I wanted in these JPEGs that I probably won't ever be getting into the RAW unless I just make an exposure mistake or something. Just remember, the JPEG, you can really bake those files. If you add too much contrast, it's really hard to take it away. If you add too much sharpening, you can't unsharpen it. So if you put some thought into how you set your camera up in your JPEGs, and you don't mind doing a little tweaking when you want to perfect that image a little bit more, then try the JPEG. It might be worth exploring for you. If you have any questions, any comments on the process, leave me a comment, and I'll try my best to answer. Well guys, until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride. A T-shirt that says, I shoot JPEG. Fro don't know JPEG. Because he can't shoot, it doesn't mean you shouldn't. Maybe he just doesn't have the skill.