Image Quality

I'm going on vacation next month to the Biltmore House in NC. and I want to take a really nice picture of the house and grounds. This of course will be from a distance. I have the 18-55mm and the 55-200mm lens which would be the best. I know the 18 will give me the wide angle but will it pick up the house good enough. Another question, image quality do I need to set it on NEF (RAW) + JPEG Basic / NEF (RAW) / JEPG fine , normal or basic. I wanting to be able to develop the picture bigger than a 8x10

Welcome to Photography Review. i would use RAW JPEG FINE and a wider view where you can get closer to the house and pick up more details. There is mainly a large lawn in front of the house so you won't be missing much. The house is very old and not air conditioned so expect to be very hot throughout the time you are inside except for when you manage to stop in front of one of the fans they have. There are many stairs that you will have to go up and down also. I'm not trying to talk you out of going but do want to give you a heads up before you go. They also do not allow pictures inside the house, Jeff

I'm puzzled.

- If you shoot RAW then this means that you're going to treat the RAW image afterwards in software and produce a corrected JPG image.
- If you choose to do RAW + JPG then the JPG produced in the camera is just a copy in case something happens to your RAW file. You probably won't use it so the quality of your JPG is not very important.
- If you are going to use the JPG out of the camera because you don't have software to treat a RAW file then why produce the RAW file?

For the highest quality you will shoot using NEF. I personal use NEF (RAW) + JPEG Basic, and edit the NEF and save to a 16bit Tiff for printing. Using a JPEG for printing throws out a lot of data and quality 1) 12 bit color depth to 8 bit, 2) the compression. Yes using TIFF the files are 20X larger or more. Note, you may not be able to get the TIFF printed at you local Walmart. But as I do my own photo printing what the local photo printers offer doesn't mater for me.

You will have to see what file formats the printer will take. You may have convert you high quality TIFF to a JPG so you can have it printed. Just make sure you can set the JPG compression to the high quality you can.

Everyone has their own way of doing things but the reason I shoot RAW, FINE JPEG is that a lot of the time I am happy with the JPEG and use it with no further work needed.. If I think I want to make adjustments, I do it on the RAW version and this way I am covered either way. If you shoot only RAW you always have to do something with it and if you shoot only JPEG you eliminate some of your options. This is why I shoot both. This works for me, Jeff