Tips And Techniques

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY HINTS AND TIPS

Film-less photographs, pictures on a chip, scanned memories, call it what you will, digital photography is a phenomenon of technology that allows for instant gratification. The Internet Brothers have been dabbling in digital imagery for years now, so we'll share some of what we've learned with you.

If you have years of experience with traditional 35mm photography, you will discover some obvious and immediate differences when you start using your brand new digital camera. Here are a few gotchas to watch out for and features to enjoy. We want you to be absolutely sure before you spend your hard-earned money.

Perhaps soon to be known as film-less photography, digital photography employs a camera just like film photography, but instead of capturing the images to film, digital media stores the photos for retrieval with a computer or for display on a television set. Some digital cameras can be connected directly to a printer device negating the need to view them on screen.

Here, we provide a few pointers on what to expect from digital cameras, photos, and why you should be interested. This is for the novice or somewhat serious amateur photographer. It is not for the professionals out there who might be prepared to spend thousands on top notch digital cameras which are not yet available to the general public at an affordable price.

What to Buy

Pocket change Digital cameras (digicams) are available for a few hundred dollars up to many thousands of dollars. For most people, the cameras that are below $1500 are the only ones to consider. At the present time, there is little to gain by spending more than $1500 unless you're prepared for an expense of $10,000 or more for a professional level camera.

It would appear at this time that Olympus and Kodak are the leaders in consumer digital camera technology. There are numerous others such as Sony, Fuji, Nikon and Agfa who also sell digicams and they may well be worth a look. Digital Camera HQ is a highly effective resource for helping to choose the equipment that's right for you.

Pick the right one
When shopping for digicams, your first consideration should be the maximum image resolution the camera can capture. Decide how much you can spend, then find the camera that will shoot the highest resolution possible. If you expect to view your photos on a large 21 inch computer monitor and your camera will capture only 640x480 pixel images, you'll be disappointed. (Yours truly has one digicam which captures images at 1024x768 and I consider this the bare minimum. My other is a 3 megapixel device that frames to 2048x1536; a lot more functional and rewarding.)

How They Work

Pics on a chip
Most digicams save images to a flash memory card and use compression to maximize the number of photos that can be stored on these cards. Consider how many photos can be stored without switching cards, whether it is enough, and whether you can afford additional memory cards. If you are planning a long vacation and don't expect to have access to a computer, this becomes a real issue. Will you be able to take all the pictures you want without running out of memory? A few cameras use some kind of miniature disk device to store images, but we question the wisdom of having a disk drive in a device as small as a camera. Sony’s "Mavica" stores images on a standard 3.5 inch diskette. This is basically a disk drive with a lens. We don’t pretend to be experts on all the cameras available, so shop around and compare features. For instance, you may want a zoom lens but not care how the camera goes about storing images.

We highly recommend buying a camera that has an optical viewfinder. It’s very cool composing your photos with the LCD display on the back of the camera ... until the batteries go dead on you. Digital cameras use batteries like speed boats use gasoline. With an optical viewfinder you can extend the battery life considerably.

Say cheese Digital Techniques - Some professional and serious amateur photographers wince at the thought of low resolution photos rendered with a computer, ignoring the fine art of traditional photography. Make no mistake, digital photography is here, it’s big, and it’s the way things will be from now on. Traditional film photography will be a thing of the past within ten years except for those few die-hards who refuse to give up.