A digital camera is a great
money saver
the way of the future
skip costs of film and developing
skip costs of ordering 35mm on CD
skip scanning pictures manually
Keep/print only the photos you want
Display/print methods:
share via email as attachments
post to family web sites (and share web site link via email)
home printer
specialized home photo printer
Kodak Kiosk
new kiosks that are attached to the 1 hour photo lab printers
Tips for finding the right digital camera:
* digital zoom on a camera is worthless - it is the same as zooming on the computer. - don't let digital zoom affect your camera purchase one way or the other. Digital zooming will result in picture quality loss.
* Optical zoom. Careful, this comes with both pro's and con's: If you need to zoom, then the best is optical zoom. In any camera (digital or video), optical zooming will provide zooming without loss of picture quality. The penalty for having optical zoom is that such a camera is no longer a point and shoot camera - you must wait 2 to 5+ seconds for the automatic focus in order to take any picture at all. If you can find a digital camera that allows for manual focus then you might be able to take pictures as fast as you want.
* Removable media - this is a must. If your camera doesn't provide removable media and it becomes full, then you're stuck until you can "unload" the camera.
Tips for taking photos:
* Set that date and time - When you move the pictures into the computer the date and time can help you know when an event happend and can help you find just the right photos you're looking for.
* Fresh batteries - low batteries will produce pictures of less quality
* Don't bother trying to turn on digital zoom while taking pictures - you'll miss important action and won't do anything that the computer can't do. And you'll immediately have picture quality loss.
The pretty little tulip icon represents macro which generally allows clear focusing of objects within 2" to 1.5' of the camera lense. General shooting without this tulip icon is generally 4'. (Each camera lense is different - read the instruction manual).
Tips for getting the photos into the computer:
I generally do not rely on bundled software to "unload" the camera into the computer. One bundled software I used had 3 major negatives in my rating of that package: 1. loss of date and time stamp the photo has 2. loss of filename and sequence number provided by the camera, and 3. loss of picture quality in prompting me to choose a format to save the picture as.
All digital cameras store their pictures and assign a 1. filename, 2. photo format (jpg/tiff/other), and 3. date and time stamp associated with the filename.
I recommend not using the bundled photo software to "unload" your camera, but to use something that allows your pictures to show up as removable media (or a hard drive). Often this requires using a "card reader" wich generally run $30.00. Occasionally the camera itself will allow the photos to show up as if on removable media.
Then use something like "my computer" or "explorer" to move the photos from the media to a photos folder on your hard drive. I find it best to have sub-directories for each set of photos (i.e. each event).
In my system, I wrote a sequence of instructions which moves all the photos from my removeable media card to dated subdirectories in my photo folder, such as 20040510 (5/10/2004, or 20031231 (12/31/2003). Then when I review my photos later I can go event by event (often there is only 1 event in any given day).
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