Why your photos aren't ready yet....

Oh hey – about those photos I took at the event that one time: I thought it might be a good idea to explain why they don’t appear immediately. Professionals (and many hobbyists like me) often take digital photos differently than you do on your phones and point and shoot cameras. We take photos in a format called “RAW” – which is a special compilation of all of the light that our camera sensors could see through the lens at the time the photo was taken. This raw format is not like a “JPEG” or “GIF” file. However, a RAW photograph can be used to produce a JPEG (or any other picture format) kind of like a film negative was once used to make prints.

Cameras that produce RAW images let you produce hundreds of differing images based on the data that the sensor in the camera provides. I can “develop” a RAW photo as if it were shot in different lighting conditions or with different exposure corrections. If I just let my camera produce a JPG instead of a RAW file, I don’t have nearly as much ability to play with the process used to "develop" the picture later.

The downside of producing a RAW file is that – since there are many hundreds of different ways that it can be developed into a JPG – it takes me a while to decide which way I want to use for that particular image. Once I make my decisions, I need to tell a special piece of software how I would like to produce a JPG from the RAW image. The JPG that the program then makes is kind of like a picture of a picture or a print off a negative. It's completely disconnected from the RAW file – and I could choose to use the RAW file again to make a different JPG that’s “developed” (or more properly, “rendered”) in a completely different way.

So those photos that I took that one time … they are not immediately uploaded to you because I haven’t done this conversion yet.