Bwing Me My Elephant Gun, Foskins

I'm hunting wabbits. As a person who has fwequently hunted wabbits I am well aware that a .470 Nitro Express may be a bad choice - the effect on me would be only a little way short of that on the wabbit. Overkill can go both ways. Those days are finished, of course, and I now get my wabbits delivered by Uber. I think the last pair have been busy as the house is filling up with tails and ears...But on to photography. I have been hunting photographic wabbits for years with heavy artillery. Starting with 4 x 5 Graphic press camera in high school days ( the seed of the disease ) and on past the sensible limits of the 35mm SLR to the heady heights of the Leica, Hasselblad, Linhof, and 10 x 12 studio camera on wheels. The wabbits posed dutifully and I worked very hard in the studio and darkroom to make big pictures of them. By and large it worked out well, though i wonder at the plumbing around this place after some of the stuff that went down it. Digital time came on and the APS-C cameras too the place of medium and large format. The enlarger was sold and the pipes dried up and generally the images were all that could be desired - until reading about RAW processing and ever-more-efficient programs started the worrying again. Was I doing the right thing? Was I getting all I should have? I embarked on the electronic version of the darkroom shenanigans. I have gone through 7 separate programs that deal with RAW images - retaining three of them now for my workflow. And they have kept me in the habit of passing all the work through them before parcelling it out to either pixel-shifting or jpeg production or storage. I'll be a lot of readers have the same story, and are doing well with it. Well, I have been shooting new tabletops in the studio with the focus-bracketing of the Fujifilm camera turned on to deal with extreme depth-of-field issues. It does well, and the two RAW programs I passed the results through also worked very well. A day's shooting of the scale models then became an evening's processing...and it wasn't until the end of the first evening that I paused to consider the workflow and output as compared to the old chemical darkroom days. It hit me with horror that, while I could do more in the studio with the models, the output here at home was the same at the end of the evening - ie. not many completed images. Me? Laziness? Lack of skill? Gettin' old? Possibly, but gettin' old happily and hoping to get older...what was taking up so much time that should have been lightning-fast? Well, apart from an older computer, the culprit was the RAW workflow. Before you burst a vein, let me assure you I know the value of the RAW discipline. I should use it for all commercial and most artistic work. But for my own web publishing, it is an impediment. My cameras - the Fujifilms - have a sensor system that can sometimes be roughly handled by Adobe products if I try to pass RAW files in. But they produce superb jpeg files that can be configured minutely in the camera. If I have control over what I see I can get what I want. And tabletop shooting in a studio under controlled lighting with ready monitoring of the sensor is going to give me that control. I have taken the plunge and passed the jpeg images for the latest week of shooting through to the end files with very little after-processing - accepted them as the thing I want in the end. They load rapidly, process rapidly, and can be finally combed with a RAW filter in Photoshop if necessary. Most times it is not necessary. The evenings now produce 26 images where once they made 8. The elephant guns are long put away, and it looks as if elephantine processing times may also be avoided. I still take RAW files in parallel with the jpeg, but if I get more confident even that may go.