I tried it and was not at all impressed with the results. Like you, I found that software enhancement in post processing that uses raw files to be considerably better - better retention, greater dynamic range, and fewer artifacts, so I have no use for it.

In Photoshop, you can mask he orange carefully, you won't lose the whiskers. Then you can make a custom brush using some of the background and paint it in on the area where the carrot was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5_RL7c9CHY

You must have have been taking pictures in the film days. Or you just used polaroid film. Darkroom equipment sales accounted for a considerable chunk of business. I don't know of a single photographer that ever displayed a contact sheet as their final work. EVERY decent photographer was at least familiar with dodge and burn, if not proficient with it. Paper negatives were a way to repeat a heavily edited print. Frisket, whether a film that was adhesive on on side and applied to a print making the area beneath it opaque to the enlarger light, or a thick liquid applied carefully with a brush to achieve the same result. Airbrushing was commonplace among retouchers. So to say that there was no post processing is not realistic.

A lot of people suggest this, but I use different exposures for raw that would never work with jpeg. In high contrast scenes, and good raw exposure is noticeably different than a jpeg. In some cases, one cannot get a jpeg to ever look good, let alone as good as a raw capture.

Case in point. The series outside of my front door one day presented a perfect opportunity to illustrate the fact that sometimes a jpeg just can't work.

I took a bracketed (.67 stops apart) series of jpegs, trying to minimize highlight loss. Even when the highlights were lost, the rest of the image was as well. I took one single raw file, optimized for highlight retention. The last two images are the edited raw file and the unedited source. Those limiting themselves to just shooting jpeg would have stopped as soon as the clouds got irrevocably blown, and deleted everything. This was just an exercise so no judgement on composition or content is necessary. Oh, and those wires!

Anyway, when adjust my camera to take a picture I don't want to worry about whether or not the jpeg will be usable. In my case, that jpeg is likely to be a waste of time (95% of the time). This is the reason I never got on board with taking both. I understand that if I were submitting my images to Reuters, I would have no choice in the matter - they will not accept anything but a camera-generated jpeg. Lucky for me that is not how I made a living.

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And the proprietary programs are really limited in range of adjustment and creative options. When you use those, you only working with a slightly enhanced version of the camera's settings. Local adjustment were taken out of Nikon's software a while back.

If having the in camera settings are that important - you can certainly create an import preset in Capture One, ON1Raw, Lightroom and DXO (and others) to simulate what you set your camera to. Or you can turn all the pre-processing off and start with a clean slate. It all boils down to how one approaches their workflow.

I used my 14-24 a lot the first 3 months of ownership, back in 2012, but recently I take it out only for night sky shooting and the occasional setting when I want to force a perspective. If I take 15K shots, I might use it for around 100 shots. I much prefer the results I get when I use a stitched panorama for landscape/city scape. However, there are times where only an ultrawide will do - and I am happy to have my 14-24. It is a very sharp and well made lens, slightly more prone to flare if the sun gets past the shade, but all in all it is an extremely well made lens.

I agree, even on my D810 the 24-120 leaves a little to be desired. It was fine on my D700, though.

Without raw editing experience, I think you'll be hard pressed to get an accurate picture (no pun) of what it takes to edit them. In reality it is usually considerably faster to edit raw files with modest skills, and considerably slower to edit jpegs in a good raster image editor like Photoshop.

The reason is raw editors are very good at making global changes, such as overall tone, color/tint balance, sharpness, contrast, brightness, revealing shadows and taming down very bright highlights. Using tools found in some editors you can perform local editing using gradients that will affect parts of an image, remove dust spots and some other defects, but in general, local adjustments are best made in raster editors.

Think of editors in terms of kitchen cutlery - a raw editor is like using a meat cleaver to break down the side of a cow, and a raster editor is like using an all-purpose traditional chef''s knife to slice an onion or soft ripe tomato. While it is possible to cut that onion or tomato with a well-sharpened cleaver, it will go much easier with the right tool.

A raw file is what the camera captures without any image settings applied to it. So it is going to look drab, lifeless soft. A jpeg out of the camera is a raw file to which camera picture settings have been applied, according to how you set the camera. In theory, you will change the white balance, contrast, sharpening, color saturation etc for each group of pictures taken in similar light. It is something most people don't do.

When processing raw files in any of the popular raw editors/converters one of the really big speed benefits is that you can edit a single image in a group taken in similar light, and apply the adjustments to all of the images in that group AND you can still make local adjustments as required on any of them individually to fine tune them.

In 2006 I purchase my first raw-capable camera, a D200, and after shooting one event with jpeg, I decided to leverage the quality buried in the camera's ability to shoot raw (even though it was 12 bit and a little crude by comparison to current tech) and have never reverted to shooting jpeg, over 200,000 pictures later.

In terms of speed to edit - I once did some work for a friend when his assistant called in sick just before a wedding. He was a jpeg-only shooter, because one of his "features" was to shoot the wedding party and bride&groom earlier in the day, and run a slide show of the afternoon shoot in the evening during the reception. That was his justification for shooting jpegs. He insisted that I shoot jpegs as well. He also had a run-and-gun style of shooting, I having done photography since 1967, I was accustomed to using a more careful, timed approach for better compositions and moments. So after the first part of the event he had around 2000 jpegs, I had half as many. There was a 2 hour break between the shoot and the reception. He spent most of his time culling his bad images and loading the remaining onto his laptop. At the same time, I grabbed my laptop and sat in a corner culling, rating, converting and lightly editing the 1000 images so he could add my jpegs to his for the slide show. I gave him my best images, around 800 or so, so he could decide what to add to the slide show - this took me a little over an hour. After a quick review, he commented about how consistent and well-exposed the images I gave him were. I simply told him that having had 41 years of experience might have had something to do with it and left it at that. I continued to shoot raw and took another 1200 images during what seemed like an endless reception. When I got home I looked at my shots, took another 90 minutes or so to edit them and uploaded my images to his website.

He asked if I would join him for future shoots because he loved my results. And again mentioned the consistency of exposure and color balance and saturation - which he found challenging. When I told him it was because I had shot them as raw and edited them using Capture One, he was shocked, angry that I didn't do as he told me to do, but then thanked me. I found out later that over half of the images that the couple ordered were from my contribution.

When you edit a raw file you are not "doctoring" up anything. You are just taking some time to reveal the information you captured with your camera, in ways that in many cases cannot be revealed once the camera has followed your generalized instructions and discarded (forever) any extra information not needed for the interpretation you directed it to do.

If you had shot your images as raw, with a decent raw editor, it might have taken you half an hour, give or take to get to a reasonable result. Of course, if you desire desired to spend some time fine tuning the result, you could always do that in Photoshop or other competent raster image editor. When you shoot people, products, real estate, etc the second step of editing the result out of a raw converter is a foregone conclusion, because there are types of operations just not possible in any raw editor.

And wait until you try all the cool focus modes using CIZ . . .

I would go one step further follow your gut and not accept the work. The best way to get these questions and those you don't know enough to ask yet is to work as a unpaid assistant to a pro who's don't this before - be very quiet, observant and do everything you are told. It's a recipe for disaster to solicit advice on a forum like this, where there is a mix of seasoned retired and working pros, aspiring amateurs, and keyboard commandos all offering advice.

You will need lots of redundant equipment - mainly because stuff happens. You may need an assistant. You'll need to be compensated for costs of rental gear, the assistant, T&E, etc etc etc - all detailed in your contract for services. Not accepting compensation is your first mistake - make sure it's you last.

Sorry to take the wind out of your sales, but I have seen this repeat itself over and over and over again - even with those that describe themselves as "pros" just because they have a camera with a battery grip and this giant erector-set looking flash bracket. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked by clients to correct the mistakes made by people like this. Don't be that guy/gal.

I still use my big cameras for most of my wildlife, but I do love the portability and very high quality. Yes, a full frame camera and big assed lens is the right gear for fine art work. But so much stuff is viewed online and on phones and tablets, that the quality of the Sony is much more than just adequate, and the downsides very easy to deal with - it's as close to a perfect camera as I have yet had the good fortune to use. I can still print very nice 20x30s as long as I am careful with composition and I don't end up cropping much. I am glad you finally got one, and I do look forward to seeing some work you've taken with it.

There is a bit of word salad in your post - and as you probably already know, sharpness, whether expressed as PmP or any other metric is highly subjective in nature. However, PmP has to do with a specific lens camera combination, which is why a given lens will have a different PmP when coupled with a 10 mp cropped sensor camera or a 45mp FX sensor.

You participated on this thread a while back:

https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-377405-3.html

https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-377405-4.html

as it was explained to me, the concept of PmP has to do with how close a particular lens-camera combination performs compared to a theoretical "flawless" lens, which would produce a PmP that is equal to the sensor resolution in mp. When you think about this a bit and stay out of the weeds, it will make perfect sense, and it explains the apparent contradiction which totally screwed around with Tony Northrup's head on this. Overwhelmed with actual verifiable facts and comments from the horse's mouth, he decided to double down on his myth-understanding.

It's surprisingly decent in crappy light - much to my surprise. I am sure I can use a little higher ISO, but haven't needed to so far.

1/80, F2.8, ISO 5000

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1/60, F3.5, ISO 6400

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Teleconverters belong on Tele (photo) lenses. Some 70-200 and 180-400 lenses will work, but shorter is problematic. And slow zooms, also problematic. Some zoom lenses come with integrated TCs that can be switched on and off.

Not ready for prime time, but at least someone is thinking about oy.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5169306661/canon-patent-details-variable-magnification-1-0-2-0x-teleconverter-with-is-and-variable-nd-filter

The law of averages predicts that a person that takes 100 pictures a year won't have as many "lucky shots" as one that takes 10,000 a year. But the 10K a year shooter will fill his web page with lots of lucky shots and NEVER tell anyone how many shots it took to get those. Just sayin'