Gig Harbor-based Amazing Grace motors towards port to pick up additional crew members in downtown Tacoma with cargo ship Honest Spring moored in Commencement Bay behind. The 83-foot topsail schooner Amazing Grace is heading up to Canada for American Sail Training Association West Coast Challenge event next weekend and will return the following week for the Tall Ships Tacoma. Russ Carmack/The News Tribune

Ninth-graders (left to right) Nolan Burger, Tony Bostwick, Hannah Doylan and Sarah Jordan leave Aylen Junior High School in Puyallup at the end of their last day there. In the school tradition they wore their finery to school on the day after the "ninth grade dance".

Why not show the girls faces? Because I wanted to emphasize the bare feet, shoes in hand, and the flow of the fabrics. Faces would have detracted from that, I think. Furthermore, the girls had difficulty ignoring the camera. They kept giggling and smiling at the camera and I prefer more candid photos.

THE JPEG FILE (MERELY CROPPED-- NO OTHER WORKUP)

THE RAW FILE AS I RENDERED IT (CROPPED, BUT NO OTHER WORKUP)

Photo enthusiasts have been talking about "shooting raw" for quite a while, but most news photographers don't actually use it. I've been shooting most of my assignments in "raw + jpeg" mode lately, except when shooting sports.

Here's an example of where the raw file rescued a shot that would otherwise be unusable.

I went to Longmire to shoot photos on the story of the hikers who were stranded on the Muir snowfield, killing one. When I got there I discovered that there was nothing to shoot-- the three hikers and their rescuers were still up at Camp Muir, and the rescue helicopter wasn't due soon.

So, since I was already there, I decided that I ought to shoot a less newsy photo depicting the unseasonable snow. I wandered around Longmire, shooting what little I could, mostly animals foraging. It was an overcast day with flat and consistent light. I chose to shoot in manual exposure mode because I didn't want the exposures to change as my frames varied from bright scenes with almost all snow, to darker scenes of mostly animal and plants.

But soon the overcast brightened and I didn't notice the change. My best frame (above) was cooked-- the grass almost disappearing in the snow's overexposure. On the camera back where only the jpeg file is displayed the shot looked unusable.

The main virtue of shooting raw is that it gives you more highlight detail, so I knew that the raw file would be better, but I couldn't know how much better.

Back in the car, when I rendered the raw file on my laptop, I made sure to keep all of the highlight detail, and as you can see above, there was just enough of it.

And a funny thing about raw files, the very tip-top of their highlights are black and white. Yes, I said that correctly, they're colorless, and I don't know why. But it just so happens that in this photo the highlights are of snow, so having no hue looks natural.

So the picture was saved.

Not that it was needed-- the next day's paper didn't have space for it.

Linda Perez, visiting from California, pauses during some clam digging at Kopachuck State Park.

When shooting low tide photos last week my thinking was that I want to get close to some interesting critter, but still show the whole place and some people. The usual technique is to use a very wide lens with a small aperture for great depth of field (great depth of field means that the foreground stuff is in focus, and so is the background stuff).

I also noticed the nice reflections in areas where the beach is fully wet, and that these reflections are maximized when the camera is very low, whether shooting with a wide lens or not.

The Nikon D2H that I use is a big SLR-- a big single lens reflex camera. Big enough that one can't get the lens really close to the ground. I can get the lens closest to the ground when holding the camera upside down and use what is ordinarily the vertical shutter release-- something that the pro cameras have.

So that's what I did. Using a 14mm (the widest lens that is commonly available) and holding the camera upside down, I shot hail-mary style with the camera close to an old crab. I had hoped the crab would hold up his claws in a defensive position, but he wasn't moving much, so I only had to watch the woman and try to catch a good moment of her activity.

Five-year-old Elona Bowyer of Gig Harbor gets a chance to hold a very large geoduck that was dug up at Kopachuck State Park near Gig Harbor during a very low tide.