Testing a New SD Card

Our View Today

Great North Mountain

I formatted a new memory card for my camera today. It has a capacity of 8 GB which is much more than my old card. I've been shooting in "Camera Raw" and the files are large (over 20 MB) so the old card was filling up too quickly.

The new card works well in my newest camera but when I tried to see the pictures on my laptop I ran into a snag. My trusty card reader was not up to the task! Fortunately Frank had given me a new card reader for Christmas (which I had never used), and I located it and voila! The files showed up on the laptop so I can process them the usual way in Photoshop.

As you can see, I shrunk the picture and added a copyright line from an image that I created for that purpose. I paste it in whenever I feel like adding the copyright message. I resisted doing that for a long time, figuring an image smaller than 5x7 inches would not be stolen but alas! I found my pictures showing up on other sites without even a credit to my name. (People, if you want to use one of my photos, please ask!)

My reason for using the "Camera Raw" is to cut down on "noise" which was showing up as blocky pixelated areas in the sky. I still get some of that when I save as a JPEG, particularly a small version like this. I always save a larger version for printing.

A disadvantage of using "Camera Raw" and large files is that each picture takes noticeably longer to save on the camera, so it's click and wait ...and wait... before I can click again. I think when I'm shooting a bunch of pictures that don't involve the sky I will switch to a smaller image size.