I am sure that everyone has done this before and I have to say, that it has not happened to me for years. Fortunately, I offload images every day and discovered at some point during an afternoon shoot, I was concentrating more on compositions and the light than where my wandering fingers were on the camera body I was using.

I currently have three converted Nikon camera bodies for infrared but took the D850 (720nm) and D750 (850nm) on a recent short trip to Joshua Tree National Park in California to scout for a future infrared workshop (maybe November 2018; maybe February 2019 … tbd).

Nikon has done a good job of keeping all the wheels, buttons, and function of the buttons located in the same place over the years on their pro-sumer and professional DSLR camera bodies. No difference between the D800 and D810 but a slight change from D810 to D850. So far, I have easily adapted to the changes. However, the D750 has dual-purpose buttons on the back of the camera instead of on the top of the body as with the D8xx series.

I move to the higher nanometer (in my case the D750 at 850nm) in the desert to bring out the different strata of rocks. As I was only in the park for a limited numbers of days (my schedule allowed for 3 days), in the time of the year when the sun doesn’t rise high in the sky (weeks from the shortest amount of daylight for the year), I did not have the luxury of watching the light and always returning to the same place more than once a day on this trip.

Have you ever experienced this? You press some button that changed the “Picture Quality” (not intentionally) while shooting? I use to do this with regular frequency when I had a mirrorless system. It drove me crazy. That camera would magically change from RAW+JPG to JPG in the camera bag (I swore). In fact, it happened so often I ditched the mirrorless system and returned to my beloved Nikon DSLRs within a year.

On the first afternoon while exploring the White Tank Campground area of the park, I was checking my focus on an image by pressing the + button in display mode to enlarge the image on the back of the camera. Clearly the display turned off about the time I pressed the + button which is dual purpose with the “Picture Quality” setting and BOOM unsuspecting me turned the camera to capture Large JPG files only instead of both RAW+Large JPG files.

Ugh. Good news is I didn’t do much more shooting as the sun was quickly setting and I did catch (and fix) the boo-boo as I download and back up files every evening.

The blessing-in-disguise was to put this JPG file through a processing test … and I am happy to report that by using the Camera RAW Filter in Photoshop (yeah yeah yeah — I’ll be porting over to Lr this winter instead of using ACR or “Bridge” as some people call Adobe Camera Raw) and Macphun/Skylum Luminar 2018, I realized I can save images from this shoot for social media and lecture purposes.

Luminar has a lot of options or “filters,” as they are called, for tweaking your images: infrared or visible light. The more I dig into the long list of available filters, the more I love Luminar. It is now my “special sauce” for finishing images after the conversion to black-and-white from the RAW infrared file.

Here is the JPG out of the camera (left) and the final processed image (right) … Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for Macphun/Skylum products and you can use my discount code (PTP10) for $10 off Luminar or Aurora HDR (10% off all Creative Kit software). Luminar and Aurora are available for both PC and Mac platforms while Creative Kit (CK) is only available for Mac.