Event coverage tip #2: Shooting in RAW format can help with tricky exposure situations
Having just finished a day-long wedding shoot, I plan to share some tips of the trade with you in the next few blog posts. Today’s tip is to shoot in RAW format. I’ve extolled on the virtues of this format here many times before and can’t emphasize enough the importance of shooting events in RAW. 
Having shot my share of events on film, I’ve gotta tell you my stress level’s a lot lower since I switched to digital. No more agonizing over whether I successfully captured a tricky lighting situation or not. With digital, I will know immediately whether or not the shot is a keeper. Plus, shooting in RAW gives me even more confidence to try making photos I wouldn’t have considered shooting on film. The photo posted here was taken at the end of the reception as things were winding down. I wanted to shoot something that captured the dance floor a bit more artistically than the flash-blur photos I had been shooting all evening. I figured I had nothing to lose but a few pixels, so I experimented a bit.
The venue lighting was tricky and called for a long exposure (1 second) to bring out the details of the tent and the dancers. I also wanted to move the camera a bit while popping a flash from the far left side to partially freeze the dancers and add some motion to the dance lights. Did I mention that this was shot during the last dance of the evening? That’s where RAW saved me time and allowed me to shoot fast with enough time to concentrate on my photography and make the shot when the dancers were in the right place. The wider exposure latitude provided by RAW allowed me to fix a lot of the problems in post-processing that I wouldn’t have been able to save had I shot this on JPEG format. For example, I bumped up the color saturation of the dance lights increased the clarity and brought back some of the detail in the blown-out highlights during post-processing.
Now that RAW has become the only format I use, I find I experiment much more than I used to and those experiments, as you see, sometimes turn out pretty well.
