Re-Reset

I don't know how this could have happened.

It's not just some sort of accidental touch of a button. Surely, I had to have made a conscious and deliberate action to have done it.

Somehow, I reset one of my D-SLRs to its default settings, such that I wasn't capturing RAW files but instead, the photos were in a standard JPEG file setting. And this reset was performed sometime between my first test-capture of the sun, through an ND 100000 filter, and last week's visit to Mud Lake.

I didn't catch the new settings right away. When I edit my photos, my go-to software is Corel PaintShop Pro: I'm currently running the 2023 version. I review the photos through the software's preview window and when I see a photo that I like, I go into editing mode.

Shooting RAW, I'm taken to a "lab," where I can correct for blown-out highlights, apply white-balancing, manipulate the exposure, and more, before I'm taken into the PSP editing workspace, where the real magic happens. If the photo was captured as a JPEG, I just go straight to the editing workspace.

The first time I looked at my photos, I wasn't paying much attention when I went straight from the preview window to the editor. As I was working on the photo, I questioned whether I had gone into the lab but in my haste, simply accepted the standard settings and clicked OK.

I finished with that photo, saved it, and went back to the preview window. When I picked a photo and clicked Edit, I became aware that I wasn't being taken to the RAW lab, and that's when it dawned on me.

My photos were being shot in JPEG, not in RAW.

I cringed, immediately picking up my camera (Nikon D7200) and went to the settings, which confirmed that the image quality was not RAW. Grumbling obscenities, I changed the mode from JPEG to RAW.

Two weekends ago, DW and I were at Mud Lake with our cameras, and we were treated to the songs and visions of the usual types of birds that can be found in this urban forest: chickadees, cardinals, nuthatches, and red-winged blackbirds. I also spotted my first robin of the year.

I snapped a few pictures but because these birds are all too common on this trail, I merely downloaded a couple of the shots directly from the camera onto my smartphone, where I edited the shots in Snapseed and uploaded them to my Instagram account.

Going this route, I'm not given any indication of the type of image quality so I didn't think anything was out of the ordinary.

Last Friday, DW and I returned to Mud Lake, hoping that the morning of a holiday would mean that the trail wouldn't be too busy, that many people would want to sleep in. And we were right: only a few avid birders were on the paths with their long lenses or binoculars.

As luck would have it, I spied two Cooper's Hawks perched on a branch, high up. My 70–300mm lens isn't that great (only f/5.6 at 300mm) but I tried my best to capture the birds. When we returned home, I transferred what I thought were some of my best shots to my phone, edited them in Snapseed, and shared them on my social-media sites.

Afterward, I decided to move the photos from the SD card to my photo database, and I wanted to edit them in PSP. That's when I discovered that the photos were shot in JPEG.

FML.

Editing in JPEG, instead of RAW, means that I don't get the full dynamic range of the camera sensor. If my whites are overexposed, I can't recover the definition in those areas. I can't get the sharpest of images and I can't make the photos as good as I can with all of the information that a RAW image can.

This was the first time that I've ever seen a Cooper's Hawk (that I know of) and there's no guarantee that they'll be at Mud Lake the next time DW and I go. But at least I found the problem with my camera now and was able to reset it to how I like to have it.

Not the sharpest, but at least I caught something.

Hopefully, it won't reset back to JPEG again, especially with the upcoming solar eclipse. Not shooting in RAW for that once-in-a-lifetime event would be heartbreaking.