It seems everyone with a camera now days is posting images on the web and trying to sell them.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make it more difficult to get work noticed as stuff gets "lost in the crowd" quite quickly.
I do think that people should at least learn some photography basics before offering images for sale. You know...like how to focus the camera, basic composition, and how to recognize defects such as various chromatic aberations, flares etc. If people do buy images online and end up with a mediocre product, they will hesitate before buying a second time, and this is not good for anyones business.
An average point and shoot camera does not consistently produce images that are good enough to make commercial prints...its that simple.
If one is to sell prints, in my opinion one should at least have the tools to do the job, as with any other profession.
Basic tools would include a SLR, or a DSLR camera, maybe a couple filters, a tripod, and a good image editor, such as Photoshop CS, or at the very least Photoshop elements.
You hear some people brag that their images are "straight from the camera", as if that is a good thing.
This shows a basic lack of knowledge of how the images are made.
Those so called "straight from the camera" shots are processed....by the little computer inside the camera to whatever specifications the manufacturer has built into it.
The in camera processor takes a look at the raw data, throws away everything it doesnt think is needed, and puts whats left together as a jpg file. Jpg is lossy compression. It also frequently includes any fringing, flares, or other defects that were captured through the lens...things that do not exist in the actual scene. Straight from the camera shots are "processed", by a little computer with programmed presets, instead of by a person that can recognise problems and correct them.
In the film days the old masters didnt offer "straight from the camera' images. The film was developed and made into photos in a dark room where, through processes such as burning, dodging, masking etc, they were made to look as good as possible.
These same processes are duplicated digitally in programs like photoshop.
If someone is paying money for a print to hang on the wall, a good final image is what they want to see. They generally dont care how it was processed, be it film or digital.
When you shoot raw, if you have fringing or other aberrations, it is much easier to fix them up, and you can even adjust things like exposure after the shot has been taken if necessary.
So, rather than let the camera process the images, in my opinion it is much better to shoot "raw" data, and process the image in a program such as Photoshop Camera Raw, and then open it in photoshop for final tweaking, and save as TIF instead of JPG. Tif is not lossy compression like jpg and you can make future edits if necessary such as tweaks for printing without degrading the file. Evey time you make a change to a jpg and re-save it it looses data, and quality degrades.
Jpg is useful for uploading to the web, posting in emails, and any time you need a small file, but other than that, its not the best way to save your images unless you are sure you wont want to do any more editing.
The only downside to saving as tif is they take up a lot of space, but hard drives are relatively cheap now days.
If you are aprehensive about jumping right in to shooting raw, set your dslr to shoot raw+jpg, and you will have both files. You can choose various quality settings for the jpg.
On many cameras you have the option of shooting 12 or 14 bit raw as well.
I usually shoot raw + jpg basic just so I can quickly sort out the images and decide which ones to keep, since raw files arent viewable in windows as shot, and must be processed first. The low quality "basic" jpg doesnt take much space.
