The linked article is picking nits. I wonder how old some of the traipsed up accusations are -- it appears the complaints re: RAW are 9-ish years old [0]. Rockwell talks about filling up 8 GB memory cards, which is a real concern when shooting multiple exposures in RAW. The difference is that now we have 128GB memory cards (which I can still get about 65% full in one night when shooting everything RAW+JPEG), faster cameras and computers, and there is little risk of RAW formats becoming unreadable.
It is also true that it takes a lot of effort to manually go through and process each individual RAW image. You either have to select a balanced preset that you think will work well and copy and paste it across the whole set and hope it turns out or spend 10-20 minutes making individual adjustments on each photo you want to use. It is very time-consuming. That hasn't changed much, though most of the compatibility and technical things he mentions are no longer issues even for photographers with budget gear.
He also has a follow-up where he argues that shooting in film is the "real RAW", which is an understandable position for someone who has spent a good deal of his life doing photography when film was the only option. [1]
His points there are solid, but personally, as an amateur don't-really-care-that-much photographer, I would never give up the convenience of digital or the photo-saving ability provided by RAWs.
Maybe if I was a better photographer "just shoot it right once instead of going back through for the second chance", as Rockwell recommends (though I'm not sure if he'd give that same advice today, almost a decade down the road), would be a feasible option, but it's not so right now. RAW combined with a miracle-grade processing pipeline (DxO) has saved my bacon many times.
The rest of the complainant's article primarily seems focused on Rockwell's spartan writing style. I think his bluntness and simplicity is a big reason for his success. Whereas many camera/lens review sites will swamp the reader with 25 middling pages of text that are mostly nonsense, Rockwell's reviews are a few pages long, have large, clean, detailed images of the reviewed item, clean section headers, and most sections have only two or three sentences.
There's no reason to get upset about Rockwell's personal opinions, which are what he shares on his personal site "kenrockwell.com". You don't have to agree. One of the reasons photography is so popular is because it's so subjective and there is tons of room for individual variation and freedom in basically everything. Let's not get too worked up here.
Comments
The linked article is picking nits. I wonder how old some of the traipsed up accusations are -- it appears the complaints re: RAW are 9-ish years old [0]. Rockwell talks about filling up 8 GB memory cards, which is a real concern when shooting multiple exposures in RAW. The difference is that now we have 128GB memory cards (which I can still get about 65% full in one night when shooting everything RAW+JPEG), faster cameras and computers, and there is little risk of RAW formats becoming unreadable.
It is also true that it takes a lot of effort to manually go through and process each individual RAW image. You either have to select a balanced preset that you think will work well and copy and paste it across the whole set and hope it turns out or spend 10-20 minutes making individual adjustments on each photo you want to use. It is very time-consuming. That hasn't changed much, though most of the compatibility and technical things he mentions are no longer issues even for photographers with budget gear.
He also has a follow-up where he argues that shooting in film is the "real RAW", which is an understandable position for someone who has spent a good deal of his life doing photography when film was the only option. [1]
His points there are solid, but personally, as an amateur don't-really-care-that-much photographer, I would never give up the convenience of digital or the photo-saving ability provided by RAWs.
Maybe if I was a better photographer "just shoot it right once instead of going back through for the second chance", as Rockwell recommends (though I'm not sure if he'd give that same advice today, almost a decade down the road), would be a feasible option, but it's not so right now. RAW combined with a miracle-grade processing pipeline (DxO) has saved my bacon many times.
The rest of the complainant's article primarily seems focused on Rockwell's spartan writing style. I think his bluntness and simplicity is a big reason for his success. Whereas many camera/lens review sites will swamp the reader with 25 middling pages of text that are mostly nonsense, Rockwell's reviews are a few pages long, have large, clean, detailed images of the reviewed item, clean section headers, and most sections have only two or three sentences.
There's no reason to get upset about Rockwell's personal opinions, which are what he shares on his personal site "kenrockwell.com". You don't have to agree. One of the reasons photography is so popular is because it's so subjective and there is tons of room for individual variation and freedom in basically everything. Let's not get too worked up here.
[0]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm
[1]: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm