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Getting The Right Digital Camera For You
There are really great advantages in digital photography: You can shoot till you drop Taking digital images on your camera has no implication other then you have captured the image. Then you can review each image on the small screen on the back of your camera. You can shoot as many pictures of the same scene as you like ? store them in memory ? delete the ones that you do not like and print the one(s) you like. Each image is a winner Alternatively you can put an image up on a computer screen or email it to all you friends ? can black mail be this easy? Print at home or in a lab You can print your image at home on a photo printer ? turn your image into a greeting card, calendar, or a whole other list of photo memorabilia. Or hand over the job to the professionals. So what digital camera should I buy? A question we are often asked is 'what sort of camera should I buy'? There are literally hundreds of different models available from a large number of well known manufacturers. This is a difficult question, which might be answered in a complex way. Rather, here we have tried to emphasise the salient points and assist you in your decision. Key components of the camera, which will influence your buying decision will include: What do I want to use the camera for? How big an image can I print? Does the camera have a zoom? What size and weight is the camera? How big an image can I print? If your objective is to take a camera on holiday, take it onto the beach and up a mountain and to print memorable images of your time on 6 x 4 inch prints, then do not spend a lot of money on your camera. A small compact camera with an image resolution of 2 or 3 Mega Pixels will be adequate for your needs and should you drop the camera or get sand in its workings then you will be pleased that you did not spend too much money. More serious photographers will want to make bigger pints or selectively enlarge. They will want a higher image resolution and will benefit from a zoom lens. So ? what is this MegaPixel thing? Well it is the image size ? quality ? taken by the camera. The higher the number ? the better the quality and the larger the prints which can be made. Does the camera have a zoom? In past times zoom lenses were regarded as second best because of their distortion and fogging. This is no longer the case ? zoom lenses are truly brilliant. 3 x zooms are common and 6 x zooms feature on the more expensive cameras. So you can have a single lens which covers both wide angle views and provides a short telephoto. All very usefully packaged in a lightweight camera. Beware of Digital Zoom. This is a technique, which zooms in on a portion of the image by processing the picture and interpolating the image between pixels ? a technique which always produces inferior results. What is the size and weight of the camera? Digital cameras do not have to be bulky or heavy. Indeed there are some very small models available, which will fit inside a handbag. However the more sophisticated gear tends to be bulkier ? and heavier. Professional models with interchangeable lenses and external flash guns will require their own hold all. Making the Right Selection There is a fantastic range of digital cameras available on the market. Nonetheless manufacturers focus on their customers and target specific models at certain sectors of the market. The table below summarises the information, which we have discussed. Basic camera A fixed lens camera priced at less than £50 [Or $90 USD] which takes digital images of up to 1 MegaPixel - will be adequate for computer or television screen display. Party Camera A compact design camera with a fixed lens ? cost up to £150 [Or $280 USD] - taking images of up to 2 MegaPixel - will generate good quality images suitable for printing up to 4 x 5 inches Holiday Camera Another compact design but with a 2 ? 1 zoom lens and costing between £200 and £400 [$350 - $800 USD] taking images or between 3 and 5 MegaPixel which will be suitable for printing up to 10 x 8 inches Serious Camera A SLR style camera with a 5 ? 1 zoom lens costing between £600 and £1000 [$1000 - $2000 USD] and producing images of up to 6 MegaPixel which will produce prints of up to 12 x 16 inches Professional Camera An SLR camera with interchangeable lenses and costing upwards of £1,500 [Or around $3000 USD], which will take images of up to 8 MegaPixel, which will print to poster size. SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex. These are cameras, which do not have a separate viewfinder. Rather the operator looks through the lens of the camera. Momentarily before the shutter is opened a mirror flicks up and the light passing through the lens is allowed to hit the sensitive surface of the camera. In many cases the lens at the front of the camera can be changed for another type. A variation on this presents the image as seen by the camera in a digital liquid crystal display either on the back of the camera or through a viewfinder. Flash. Many of the inexpensive cameras will have on board flash ? remember that these will only work up to about 10 feet, and they might produce red eye. More expensive cameras will expect the user to use an independent external flashgun. Camera Accessories Most digital cameras come with interface cables and PC software bundled. So if you have a PC at home or work you can 'download' images from your camera to your PC, do basic editing such as removing red eye and delete the images you do not want! Your valued images you can store for future generations on CD Rom or another recording medium. Digital Memory Media Sometimes known as Smart Card, Compact Flash, Multi Media Card, Memory Stick. These are the memory chips on which your images are stored ? some people refer to them as digital film. The larger the capacity of the media, the more images it can store. So buy one larger then you need ? for now. Images can be deleted from the media ? but back them up on a CD Rom or DVD before you erase the card. Final Hint ? Keep lots of batteries handy. Digital cameras use a lot of power! Christopher Thomas is a keen photographer and company director of Viewlink Ltd based in Amersham, Uk. The company provides digital photo developing for both amateur and commercial photographers. For more articles by Christopher Thomas please visit the company website at http://www.view-link.com/guides.html
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One of the best things you can do to make your work flow more efficient is to get as much of your image perfect in the camera as possible. Many digital photographers have fallen into the "I can fix it on the computer" trap. This costs you time and money. The more time you spend "fixing" a photo after you've tripped the shutter, the less time you are spending with clients. Here are a few tips to help reduce your workload from the time you make your exposure: Set your white-balance to match your scene. If you get the proper white-balance in the camera, you won't have to adjust it later on the computer. See your camera documentation for how to set a custom white-balance. Remember to set your white balance whenever you change lenses, or the quality of light. If you change modifiers, or lenses, change your white-balance as well. Expose for the highlights. Since digital acts similar to slide film, its easy to accidentally blow your highlights. By exposing for the hot parts of the image, you'll save yourself some time in the long run. Scan your frame. Get in the habit of doing a top-to-bottom scan of your frame before you trip the shutter. This will help you avoid stray hairs, lights in your frame, reflectors being visible, and anything that you might have to clone out of the image later. Work flow Step 2: Importing and Backing Up Your Images There are many ways to get your images from your camera to your computer. Some people use a card reader that will read the images off the memory card from the camera. Others connect the camera directly to the computer and import the images directly. No matter how you get the images to the computer, your first step is to setup an organizational structure for the images and create a backup copy of the RAW files for safety. First, create a folder to store your image files. In our studio, we use the folder name to organize our images. For instance, let's say we are importing images from a portrait session with Jane Doe that took place on January 1st, 2005. Our folder name for this session would be P_2005_DoeJane_0101. If we also did a portrait session with John Doe on the same date, our folder would be named P_2005_DoeJohn_0101. This allows us to keep our images organized in a way that we are familiar with. Use whatever folder structure you like, as long as it helps you keep things organized. Next, we will create the folders under our P_2005_DoeJane_0101 folder that we will use during the course of processing the images. We create the following folders: RAW, WORK, and JPEG. The final file structure looks like this: -+P_2005_DoeJane_0101 -|-RAW -|-WORK -|-JPEG The RAW folder holds our RAW image files, the WORK directory holds the processed TIFF files where we will do all of our editing, and the JPEG folder holds the completed files, ready to be uploaded to the lab. Copy the images from your camera to the RAW folder using whichever method you prefer. As soon as this initial copy is complete, make a backup copy of these images. Some photographers backup to writable CD-ROM or DVD discs. Other photographers backup to a separate backup hard drive. No matter what method you choose for your backups, they are CRITICAL. Make sure you can recover your images if something should happen to your memory card. Work flow Step 3: Verify Your Backup Your backup copy of the RAW images files is important. Take a moment to verify that you can read the images you copied to your backup medium. Once you have verified your backup medium, you may proceed with the work flow. Work flow Step 4: Culling the Herd Converting the images you never want the client to see wastes time and money. Use your preferred image browser to go through the RAW images and delete any that you know you won't use. Don't worry about deleting the wrong file, that is why we made a backup. If you delete a file you wanted, just bring it back from your backup. Once you have selected your "keepers" from the RAW images, it is time to move on to the next step. Work flow Step 5: File Conversion Most cameras come with software specifically designed to convert the RAW image data from its native format into TIFF files, JPEG files, or some other format that is compatible with the popular image editing software. At our studio, we convert the RAW images into 16-bit TIFF files, because we like to have the maximum amount of data available for editing and processing. Your needs may vary. There are many articles on the Internet that deal with the different file formats and the pros and cons of each. For the purpose of this tutorial, we are going to assume that the files are being converted to 16-bit TIFF files. We now open the software that came with our camera and set it to convert our RAW image data to 16-bit TIFF files, and save them in the TIFF folder we created in Work flow Step 2. This step can be time consuming, so we often go out to eat while the images from a session are converting. Once the conversion is finished, you will have a folder of 16-bit TIFF files to do editing and retouching on. We use TIFF at our studio because it is a loss less format. That is, we can save the file as many times as we like without degrading the image quality. JPEG is a lossy format, every time you save a JPEG file, you lose a little more data to compression. Work flow Step 6: Editing and Retouching This step of our work flow is where the real work is done. You will open each TIFF file in the image editor of your choice and make sure your colors and exposure are correct, the crop is the way you want it, and the image is ready for printing. At this point you will make any edits to the image, such as changing the crop, converting it to black and white, or doing any needed retouching. If you use the TIFF file format, you can save as many times as you need to during this process without having to worry about losing image quality. Once editing and retouching is done, save your work file and move on to the next step. Work flow Step 7: Saving the Production File One of the cons to working with 16-bit TIFF files is that they take up an incredible amount of disk space. Once we have reviewed the images with the client and ensured that no further edits/retouching need to be made, we convert the TIFF file to a JPEG production file for archive purposes and sending to the lab. Open the TIFF file in your preferred image editor and save your file as a Baseline Level 10 JPEG in the JPEG folder we created earlier. Why not save as a Level 12 JPEG, you might ask. 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