So mellow yellow (Part 2)

Here are a few more photos in shades of yellow. They’re all from when I first started taking photos with digital equipment again after a twenty-year break. Back then, I didn’t know to pay special attention to the yellow channel :-) I was thrilled by the ability to take an endless number of photos and to see the results right away, no longer limited to 36 shots.
Then I bought a memory card – I don’t remember if it was 128 or 256 MB – and I started taking photos properly instead of just snapping away. Many times during my photo trips, I ran out of space on the card. I’d have to go through what I’d already saved and make the tough decision of what to delete and what to keep. It was a good lesson in thinking.

I have all my photos on my computer, including those from when I first started taking pictures. I sort through them in two stages. First, after transferring them to the hard drive, I discard the obviously bad ones — those that are out of focus, blurry or accidental shots.

Then I leave these photos to 'mature' for a day or two, or even a week. That’s when I start editing them in Lightroom and the second selection process begins. Fortunately, the selection process isn’t too strict, and some photos with imperfections make the cut.

It turned out years later that it was the right decision. Editing software has come a long way and most things can now be fixed.

The photos I'm posting now are 15 years old. I’ve never developed them before. I’m deliberately using the word “developed” because I save RAW files on my camera (some people spell it RAW—I see that even my automatic translator changed “raw” to RAW); in Nikon (since that’s the system I use), these are files with the NEF (Nikon Electronic Format) extension.

Before digital photography existed, most people stored their photos as prints on photographic paper. To create a print, a negative had to be exposed in a camera and then developed using the appropriate chemical process. Finally, the image from the negative had to be exposed onto photographic paper. The negative was therefore an intermediate product, a medium necessary to obtain the final photograph. Once the image from the negative had been exposed onto photographic paper, it could be subjected to a series of steps involving photographic chemistry and darkroom techniques. This allowed us to manipulate the final image; for example, we could adjust the contrast or colour tone quite freely.

When we take photos with a digital camera, we can save them as JPG files. This format allows us to view photos on a computer or TV screen and print them. Images saved as JPG files also undergo post-processing, which is handled by the camera's electronics. Some cameras give us more control over this process than others, but ultimately, it is always largely automatic.

That is precisely the purpose of the RAW (NEF) format. It enables you to save an image directly from the camera's sensor without any processing by the camera's electronics. In a sense, you could say that RAW is the digital equivalent of a traditional negative.

Automatically translated from Polish using DeepL