Getting the Most From Your Digital Camera

As most Rotarians grew up in the age of Kodachrome, digital cameras may seem like machines from another planet. If you skipped over the 'programming your VCR' phase of technology, but still want to understand your digital camera, read on to learn some simple, practical tips for selecting and using a digital camera and how best to enjoy a finished, printed picture.

Purchasing a digital camera
The three key factors when selecting a digital camera are pixels, lens and cost. Pixels are the number of PICture ELements, or teenie-tiny little dots that can sense light and color inside your camera. The more of these you have the better. Today's cameras are usually rated in terms 'mega-pixels' With a large mega-pixel value you can make enlargements of your pictures without getting 'blotchy' results. Again the more mega-pixels the better - in general, anything over 5 mega-pixels will give you good 8X10 enlargements.

Camera lenses are typically measured in 'zoom power' (e.g. 3X Zoom). But you need to make sure it is 'optical zoom' and not 'digital zoom'. Optical zoom costs money as in additional lens elements and gearing to move the lens elements back an forth. Digital zoom is performed by the camera's computer and just enlarges the pixels into bigger dots which gives you blotchier pictures. You can 'zoom in' later when editing the pictures on your home computer, which will generally give you better results than the computer in the camera. Glass lenses are better than plastic (they don't scratch as much). Also make sure the lens is auto-focus and not fixed-focus. Fixed focus cameras are like the old 126 cameras or today's single use cameras. Cell phone cameras are also generally fixed-focus. In general, fixed focus cameras take crummy pictures.

With regard to cost, as with any appliance or electronic gadget, don't go over your budget. You can purchase excellent cameras in the $200-300 price range. Also, don't spend extra money on features you will never use. If you find a camera you like and it is in your price range, but it has some doodad you will never use that is fine, but it makes no sense to spend an additional $150 to get a camera that takes pictures underwater when you do not know how to swim.

Learning about your camera
Yes, you should read the manual - at least the overview. I know there is often a fear factor here, but working an automatic digital camera is really no more difficult than learning to drive a car. You had to study for that, so spend a little time reading your camera's manual. If you lost it, you can almost certainly get it on-line. To help you get started, here are some things you will want to know...

  • How to zoom-in and zoom-out. Next to the flash, this is probably the most popular feature of today's digital cameras.
  • How to turn the flash on and off. Also how to turn red-eye reduction on and off. I will explain a little later why these are important. For now, just learn this. On most cameras, one button usually controls both of these 'flash' functions.
  • How to charge the battery and connect the camera to your computer. Remember my battery lessons, always completely charge a new battery overnight and modern lithium-ion batteries have about 300 charge cycles in them.
  • How to preview pictures on your camera and how to delete pictures using your camera.

    With regards to your camera's film, also known as the camera's memory card, these come in all shapes and sizes, both physically and they amount of pictures they hold. Memory cards used to be rated in megabytes (MB), now they are rated in gigabytes (GB). The more GB the more pictures you can store on a card (a byte is roughly equivalent to one character of information, a gigabyte is a billion of these, the Club's 5 megapixel camera uses about one million bytes for each picture, so get out your calculator...) The memory card that comes out of the box with most cameras is very tiny and doesn't hold a lot of pictures. It is a good idea (just like with film) to have more than one memory card. Make sure the card you buy works in your camera. Some of the newer cards will not work in older cameras. If you are not sure, bring your camera to the store and of the geeks will help you choose the right one.

    Taking pictures - the basics
    Don't be afraid to take more than one picture. This is the secret of professional photographers. They will take literally hundreds of pictures, knowing in advance that they are not going to use the vast majority of the pictures. So, with a digital camera you only print the pictures you want, the rest you look at on your computer. Which means taking lots and lots of pictures costs you nothing. Did I say take lots of pictures?

    You should give some thought when 'framing' the picture.

  • Is your picture going to be landscape (short and wide) or portrait (tall and thin)? For landscape, hold the camera normally, for portrait, rotate the camera 90 degrees in either direction.
  • Pay attention to what is behind your subject. Pictures are two dimensional, so that telephone pole or tree branch innocently standing behind your mom is now coming out of her head in your picture.
  • Remember to balance foreground and background. This is especially true with vacation photos where you are going for the photo-op of the family in front of something big. If the family is off in the distance with the monument or waterfall or whatever, they will look like specs in your picture. Bring them closer to you and frame the big thing behind them.

    Lighting is probably the most challenging aspect of picture taking. Professionals have all sorts of special equipment to help them get the lighting just right. You have your camera and you. Here are some tips to help you get the lighting right:

  • If you are not taking pictures of people, you may want to turn off the 'red-eye' feature on your camera. This will allow you to take successive pictures with less delay in between each picture.
  • Your camera's flash is only good for about 12-15 feet. Any thing further away will not receive enough light from your flash to make a difference. So at the graduation, sporting event, concert, forget your flash.
  • Now that you have turned your flash off, in low light situations, your camera will keep the shutter open longer to allow it to get enough light to take a picture. What does that mean? This means that if you move your camera, even a tiny bit, when taking a picture in low light with the flash off, you will have a very, very blurry picture. In this situation, if you have a tripod, use it. If you do not have a tripod, hold your camera snugly (tightly will tend to shake the camera) against something steady like a hand-rail, a chair, table, your car, the corner of a wall or building, generally, anything bigger than you.
  • Use natural lighting whenever possible. This is what the professionals do. Remember the low-light tips above.
  • Sometimes, in low or weird lighting situations, I will turn my flash back on to try and enhance pictures and/or fool the camera into taking the picture differently.

    Did I tell you to take lots of pictures? Don't be shy. Actually, never be shy. You are not wasting film anymore. That mega-giga memory card holds hundreds of pictures. Fill it up! Take more pictures! You will be glad you did!

    Taking pictures - advanced
    Most digital cameras have different 'modes'. Some examples are normal (of course), museum, sport, panorama, close-up, night time and so on. These work great when taking normal pictures, pictures at a museum (the camera already knows no flash pictures allowed), stop action pictures, grand-canyon pictures, baby's face up close or at dusk by the fountain downtown. You get the idea. Unfortunately, every camera is different so yes, read the manual.

    Some cameras allow you to adjust how the camera 'meters' a picture. This means the camera uses different techniques to sense the lighting of the picture being taken. For example, some cameras can be set to recognizing faces for portrait work (this is the normal mode for some cameras) or you can set it to recognize the sky and earth for outdoor shots. As before, every camera is different so yes, read the manual.

    Many cameras let you adjust the picture resolution. With higher resolution settings you can make crisper, cleaner, bigger enlargements. This will use up more memory on your camera's memory card. It will also probably take more time in between pictures (it takes longer to 'write' the bigger picture out to the memory card).

    Many cameras let you take short movies. This is typically one of the 'modes' you can choose from. Some cameras also have a microphone, so you may get sound with your movie. Please note that these movies are not anywhere near the quality of a good hand-held movie camera. But they great for capturing Uncle Bob trying to skateboard when you do not have your movie camera with you.

    Printing pictures
    This, as the popular saying goes, is where the rubber meets the road. While there are many options available for viewing digital photos, everyone still prints out pictures for display in their homes or office or to give to family and friends. Making good quality prints is relatively straightforward.

    The first thing you need to do is to get your pictures from your camera into your computer. There are two methods for doing this. First, you can simply use the cord that came with your camera. One end goes in the camera, the other plugs into your computer. Second, you can take the memory card out of the camera and plug into your computer or your printer. Either way, your camera / camera card will look like another disk drive to your computer. This will appear as another 'lettered' drive (like 'F:' or 'G:') in My Computer for PC users or another disk drive on your desktop for Macintosh users.

    Once you are hooked up, you should copy the pictures from your camera / camera card to a folder on your computer. A good system to follow is to create a new folder in your computer's 'My Pictures' area using today's date for the folder name. If you format the date as year-month-day (e.g. 20090702), then your list of picture folders will sort properly on your computer.

    Once your pictures are on your computer, you can safely remove them from your camera's memory card. I usually just 'format' the memory card in the camera to bring it back to its 'factory' state.

    Now that your pictures are in your computer, you should review the pictures to see which ones you may want to have printed. While reviewing your pictures, you can also decide if you want to edit your pictures before printing. Most cameras (and most computers) include photo editing software you can load on your computer, or you can always download and use Picasa from Google. Here are some of the things you can do with your photo editing software:

  • Crop your pictures to remove things you don't care about and focus on your subject
  • 'Zoom in' - after you crop a photo, you can enlarge what remains effectively zooming in on your subject.
  • Adjust brightness, contrast, colors - so even if the lighting wasn't perfect when you took the picture, your photo editing software can 'fix' these problems, often with amazing results.
  • Remove red-eye, other blemishes
  • Print more than one picture on a sheet of photo paper

    Before making changes to the original photo, you may want to make a copy of the original image file and edit the copy. If you ever want to go back to the original and crop it differently or make other changes, you will be unable to do so if you edit the original.

    Now that you have the pictures you want printed edited just right, you have two main options for printing them. You can print them yourself on your printer, or you can take them to the store to have them printed there. If you are going to take them to the store, the easiest way to do that is to upload them to the store's web site. Most photo processing stores allow you to do this.

    If you decide to print them at home, be sure to use photo paper. Generic photo paper works great and generally costs less. For fine prints you should use the expensive glossy photo paper. When you use photo paper, be sure to tell your printer what paper you are using. This is normally done by clicking on a printer 'Setup' button just after you choose 'File - Print'. Most printers also have a photo-enhance option which you should also turn on. Making these printer setting changes is important and will dramatically improve the quality of your printed picture.

    Storing pictures
    Pictures that you print may be stored the same way as any photo print. Please note that pictures printed at home are more susceptible to water damage than store prints.

    The original digital picture files can be left on your computer, but like anything stored on your computer you should back these up onto a backup device or medium like CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. You can even create slide shows with camera software and store them on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. Here is what I do: I always make a copy of the original folder and make any editing changes or slide show creation on the copies; then I make two backups of the original folder and the folder with the edits on CD/DVD and physically separate the backups to ensure one remains safe in the event of a disaster (e.g. one at home and the other at the office or with a relative). Once the pictures have been backed up safely, they can safely be removed from your computer. By the way, backed up safely means you have made sure that the CDs you just burned actually have the pictures stored on them correctly.

    Q & A
    At the end of the presentation there was some discussion regarding which is better for long term storage of your pictures, CD/DVD media or a 'thumb drive'. Well, my research into this was somewhat entertaining. With respect to the life span of CD/DVD media, CD manufacturers said 50-200 years, competing technology companies said 2-5 years and quite a few real people said they can read discs burned over 10 years ago just fine. Since the real people to not have a financial interest in the debate, I trust them. Please note that you should stay away from the ultra-cheap media. The rule of thumb I use when purchasing media is I buy brand names that I recognize. With regards to the life span of thumb drives, I was not able to find anything definitive from a source I trust. By design, thumb drives actually wear out after about 100,000 'write cycles' (they did not do this to be funny, it is just they physics of the circuitry involved). Now that is actually a lot of writes to a thumb drive, and if you just write to it a handful of times to back-up your pictures, it doesn't really matter. The capacity of thumb drives is quite large and holds quite a bit more than a single CD. This is a blessing and a curse; a blessing because you can store so much more on it and a curse because a failure or loss of the device will cause more lost pictures. So, with all that, which is best? You tell me. For me, I am sticking with my original answer - CDs.

    There was also a question about the truth of the statement that each time you view a picture file its fidelity decreases. At the meeting I stated, correctly, that this is patently untrue. After I thought about this some more, I realized that this is true each time you edit and save a picture. So, if you make changes to a picture, save and close it, reopen your changed version and so on several times, there will be a loss of picture quality after each save (while you are editing it, you can save it as many times as you want without additional loss of quality, only when you save, close and reopen is this true). This is another reason why I always go back to the original picture file, make a copy and then edit the copy.

    There was also a question about the quality of photo paper. Generic photo paper that comes 50 or more sheets to a pack is fine for everyday 3X5 or 4X6 prints. For items that you want to frame, I would recommend using premium glossy photo paper. With regards to the aging of pictures on photo paper the Internet was once again entertaining. I believe it is safe to say that framed behind UV glass your printed pictures should last at least as long as traditional prints. At the meeting I said this was somewhat moot as you can always print out another copy if the first one fades.