Actually took my camera out and took some photos

[Sam]

Nothing special, just twitting about with RAW really whilst out on a walk.

[DubFan]

Most of them look really dark.
I think the camera has had issues exposing correctly because there's so much sky in each shot.
You can change your angle when you're shooting, so that you're not shooting into the sun/bright part of the sky.
The advantage to RAW is that you can make the shadows quite a lot lighter without too much of a problem.
It also looks like you've added vignetting around the photos, making them dark round the edges. But that is a personal preference.

There's a blurry bird or something in the top of the second shot, which could have been easily cloned out.
The last one is rather blurry in the grass and the angle of the sign post doesn't look right which is probably down to the lens you've used.

It looks like an interesting place though. One to visit again.

[Sam]

Thats the problem with editing late at night in a dark room. Your work always ends up darker than it should be, done it before. As for sky and ground thing I do that most times, just forgot to for some stupid reason, I guess I wasn't too fussed at I wanted to see the magic of 'RAW'.

Cheers for the critique though, helpful stuff. The place is called Moira Furnace if you wanted to look into it at all.

[DubFan]

Shooting in RAW is very handy. I used to shoot mostly in jpg because I couldn't be bothered with large RAW files. But I switched over a while ago.
RAW isn't magic though. You've got to have some data there to work with.
If for example the sky is over exposed and white, even if you slide the "highlights" slider all the way down it's not going to be able to bring back the sky and make it look blue. Sometimes trying drastic actions to correct an over or under-exposed photo just ends up with photos looking not quite right.

That said if you take a decent photo but there are parts of it that aren't quite light enough or bits that are a little too bright, then you can make the most of RAW data.
The other time RAW is handy is when you take a photo but realise that you need to crop it quite a lot to make a good image. But in cropping it you lose pixels. Obviously in jpg, there's less detail when you zoom in, but in RAW, you'll have more detail when you crop the image and enlarge.

Go out and shoot more. You only get better at something if you do it more.

[Sam]

This is it isn't it, classic quote amongst cyclists is when Eddy Merckx got asked what the best way to improve their riding he simply said 'Ride lots'... true with everything