Towards the end of 2020, I headed out to The Roaches in the Peak District. It’s a popular area with climbers and gives excellent views over the Staffordshire countryside.

You may recall that 2020 was when the world was in lockdown with COVID. Because of this, I hadn’t been out much with the Camera and made the mistake of leaving a flat battery in it. Although I had spare batteries, the flat battery was enough to cause the camera to lose all my settings. Fiddling around in the dark before sunrise, I reset everything. At least that’s what I thought.

Here is one of my favourite shots from that morning.

It was taken using the Panasonic Lumix G9 with a Panasonic 45 to 150 lens set to 138 mm. The exposure is 1/60 of a second at F7.1 and ISO 200.

As this marvellous scene unfolded, I put the Panasonic into high-resolution mode. This is where the mistake occurred. Although I had reset the quality of the camera to shoot in RAW format, I hadn’t realised that the high-resolution mode had separate settings. Those defaulted to shooting Jpeg Images only and didn’t capture a RAW file.

When I got home and downloaded my images onto the computer, I was disappointed to see only JPEG images. I ignored these for a long time, and it was only yesterday that I decided to try to process one.

I made my initial adjustments in Lightroom. Honestly, I didn’t really need to do much because the camera has done most of the processing already. All that was required was a minor tweak to the contrast because I wanted the mist to be more defined. I then exported the image to Photoshop, applying Topaz Denoise AI. If you’ve ever used Topaz DeNoise AI, you know that it also applies a small amount of sharpening to the image. Again, nothing much was required to improve this image.

Looking closely at the image at 100% magnification, the quality seems extremely good. It’s not quite what I could achieve with a RAW file, but it will still produce a fantastic print.

This entire story has made me realise (yet again) that I make many assumptions when it comes to photography. I frequently don’t try things simply because I think they probably won’t work. Therefore, I tend to ignore shooting in the JPEG format and instead shoot RAW. Whilst that’s good practice, there are times when the camera produces excellent colour in the JPEG that I prefer to the RAW file.

The same is also true of my photo editing. I tend not to try techniques because, at some time, I’ve disliked the result. This week’s YouTube video is another example. In it, I explained how to create an abstract artistic effect using Affinity Photo and multiple exposures. The result, whilst not to my taste, can easily be modified and improved. It would just take a little bit of effort and thinking.

I hope you like this week’s image and have a great weekend.