http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/education/technical/shooting_sport.do
generally speaking, on a windy day outdoors, machine-gun shooting can come in handy. especially if the model has long hair and/or is in motion. in a studio setting, machine-gun shooting is not quite so necessary, unless the model is in motion.
when one has full control over light and has experience with a given camera, then jpg can be great. when the exposure may be in question, and/or when one is shooting a dark object against a bright background, or vice versa, raw would be the better way to go. raw gives more flexibility in post-processing, so if it's an image you're going to want to photoshop a lot, go with raw! also, many say that ultimately raw can give sharper images, but that would depend on a lot!
the general trends are towards 1) less expensive hard drives 2) less expensive CF/SD cards, so the fact that both raw shooting and machine-gun shooting tend to take up a lot of space fast, is becoming less and less a factor. also, jpeg oft works better for machine-gun shooting as it allows for faster/more continuous shots--so if you're shooting a model with long hair on a windy day, continous/jpeg is probably your best bet for catching a usable photo.
long story short--shoot both jpegs and raw--shoot both machine-gun style and short bursts! see what works for you and your camera, as the raw vs. jpeg feel varies form camera to camera! keep the options open and use them creatively in the shoot, as needed.
and finally, play around with the video on your camera! i recently saw many people in a forum adamantly stating that they wanted canon and nikon to *remove* the video from their dslr cameras, and i don't think they were joking! last night i was reading a magazine and all the up-and-coming pros featured were talking about how they were using the canon 5d to shoot video too--i'll find the article and post some excerpts here. the bottom line--have fun playing around with the video!
rock on, have fun, & shoot it all! :) develop your own style. & remember it's not about the camera, nor you even, but the photograph.
Hero's Journey Entrepreneurship Principle #51: Play.
Carl Jung: The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Heraclitus: Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Michael Jordan: Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.
George Bernard Shaw: We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
R.P. Feynman: I was in the cafeteria (at Cornell) and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start figuring out the motion of the rotating plate. I discovered that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! I went on to work out equations for wobbles. Then I thought about how the electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it… the whole business that I got the Nobel prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate. –Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman
Plato: You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
Tiger Woods: Don't force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It's the child's desire to play that matters, not the parent's desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.
GK Chesterton: The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
Carl Jung: Without the playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
