Digital Photography

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In my view Picasa (Google's own Photo organiser) is one of the best programs available and free!  Just click the Logo above. To see why I am so keen click Next Page above.
It is even possible to upload your photos to Picasa.  Mine are at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/paterson.keith.

Cameras keep coming down in price and increasing their facilities.  A Vivitar V8400 8 Megapixel, 3 x zoom at £43 at Ebuyer.
Or Canon 7.1 Megapixel with 4 x optical zoom  £82 delivered. Amazon. I got one. Super. See a review HERE   Kodak Easyshare V1233 12.1mp 3x Optical Zoom Digital Camera £85 12.1 megapixel ! Even the most professional digital cameras a few years back had not got that definition.

If you want some expert tuition in digital photography from Hewlwett Packard try http://h30240.www3.hp.com/

A similar service is provided by Aldi at http://www.aldiphotos.co.uk/  This site not only offers an on line print service, an online  place to store photos but also downloadable photo editing software and album making software.  Print prices are 5p (6"x4") and 10p (7"x5") plus postage.  Better for smaller numbers but with no discounts for large quantities. Boots charges are (6"x4") 20p for 1, 10p for 50, 7 p for 100.  (5 "x 7") 25p for 1, 15p for 50, 12p for 100 + £2.50 post.

For those with Windows Vista Microsoft were not to be outdone and have brought out Windows Live Photo Gallery. See http://get.live.com/betas/photogallery_betas It is very similar to Windows Photo Gallery which comes with Vista, but the 'Live' version will also work with XP.  It offers various 'fixes' for photos such as red eye removal, crop etc. but the Vista version also allows, burn to disk, send various picture sizes with your email program etc and links in with Windows Movie Maker for the creation of 'still movies'.

One of the most rewarding aspects of computing is its ability to take, display, send and print photographs. These days a basic digital camera can be bought for under £100 e.g. the Canon digital camera. 7.1Megapixel, 4 x Optical zoom £79.87 Ebuyer. With an additional 1Gb  memory card this would be around £83.

To see what can be achieved with a good eye for a picture and a good camera see http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/vitalmoon/   Ali, the photographer, has Downs Syndrome. Here is just one example of her work. .

I recommend a digital camera as a simple and satisfying (and economical) addition to your armoury. Here is an example of what you can do with my simple 'snapshot' type of digital camera.

Queens College Cambridge in Spring

Close-ups are easy with digital

Digital Photography.  

If you have Broadband you can view a good but technical video about digital photography at http://www.fujifilm.co.uk/digital/real_photo_technology/index_expert.php

A digital camera has no film and, if you wish to just display the pictures on your computer, once bought, there are no further costs apart from batteries. The pictures are stored temporarily in the memory of the camera.  They can then be transferred simply to a computer via a USB cable and then erased from the camera.  All but the cheapest cameras enable you to view the pictures on a small screen at the back of the camera and it is possible to delete ones that you don't like, there and then.

I know several people whose lives have been enriched by using a digital camera, whether it be to send pictures of children to loved ones far away or to record a flower or even and insect in the garden.  It is one of the simplest of peripherals to set up and use, especially if you have Windows XP or Vista. You can be taking and viewing pictures in minutes. The ability to see you pictures full screen also enhances them compared with viewing prints in an album.  I would recommend anyone to get one of these wonderful devices for their own pleasure - and to impress/bore others !

Cameras

So, much depends upon what you expect from a camera. My little Sony has a mere 2 megapixels but its size makes it so convenient it is the one I use for preference and the quality of pictures is still good.  Its main drawback is not having a viewfinder and the tiny LCD screen at the back is not easy to view in bright sunlight.  

Photo taken with a Kodak Easyshare 3.2 mpixel camera

By January 2008 we were seeing 10 and 12 megapixel cameras with optical zoom for around £100. The one below even includes a 512Mb memory card but many do not include a card, so that is extra. But a 1 Gb SD card from Ebuyer is only £5.00. Another good buy is the Hitachi 8 megapixek + 3 x zoom at £64.99 (Argos Feb 08)

What to look for in a camera  You can spend from £8 to thousands.

It is possible to get a digital camera for as little as £8 but do try to compare results if you can. I had a look at a Polaroid digital camera from Argos. On their own the pictures were tolerable, especially if taken in good light. A little 'washed out' perhaps but not bad.  But taking a picture like the one above was impossible.  They were out of focus. Secondly, taking a close up flash photo was even worse. The camera did not compensate for the distance and the result was completely 'burnt up' (white).  I then tried an Olympus Camedia for a few pounds more.  What a difference !  The picture below was the first I took with it, using flash.  The depth of focus, from a few inches to the printer at the back, is remarkable. Far greater than you could expect from a roll film camera. And it obviously compensated very well for the closeness of the scene. And the detail... I can even read some of the text on a print I did.

Other features of this camera include Date and Time, a bright LCD screen, a cable to connect to your TV or video, , automatic focus,  red eye reduction as well as 3 other flash modes, a digital zoom, self timer, a battery saver (in case you forget to turn it off), DC power in socket, macro (close up - 6 inches),  video (movie), four quality settings and even a panorama and two-picture combination facility. Quite remarkable. There is also some useful software which includes a nice Calendar program and a facility for joining two pictures to make a panorama.  Any criticisms ?  It is plastic bodied and the zoom is digital, rather than optical (and only 2.5 times).  But with digital photography it is easy to manipulate photos later by 'cropping'  the picture of that far-away wedding group, so it looks as if you were just in front of them.

By 2008  there had been a number of advances in digital cameras and the prices were still reasonable. I decided to get a Canon Powershot A560 from Ebuyer at £83 delivered, including a 1Gb memory card. Over and above the advantages of previous cameras this had such things as a large LCD screen, numerous easy settings for indoor, night, portrait (softer), multiple shots (even on self timer), sound video (large and small files) and direct printing to a suitable (Pictbridge) printer.
 
Please bear in mind that the file size of this picture below has been reduced to a mere 38k (so you don't have to wait ages for it to appear, even on dialup). The quality of the original was even better than this but the file size was around 450k. Many cameras now produce pictures of more than 2 Megabytes apiece. The quality is superb but they MUST be compressed if you are sending many by email. Even using Broadband to upload a lot of snaps of this size would take ages and will end up being hardly viewable because they fill the screen twice over. Apart from that, the pictures take a great deal of hard disk space. But if you want to send such pictures to people with e-mails there are programs which will send a smaller version, keeping the original as it is. Software such as Picasa does this (see next page) Some email programs, such as Windows Live Mail, will also do this.

Depth of focus (from front to back) is better than with a traditional camera

So, as you may gather, I was very impressed with the inexpensive Olympus Camedia camera. You can get other reasonably priced cameras is from places like Novatech (Portsmouth) These days the megapixel range has gone up, so have the digital and optical zoom facilities.

Cavendish, Suffolk. This picture is a mere 15k. The effect of the massive compression can be seen in the sky, so it is better to keep an original if you expect to print them. One way to make and send a smaller compressed version (as well as keeping the original) is to go to My Pictures and right click a picture, click Send to and then click on Mail Recipient from the list that appears. Click to compress the file. Your e-mail program should show with the graphic attachment greatly reduced in size (kb) 

Computer Based Photo Albums - With digital photography being so easy and inexpensive it is not long before you realise that printing every photograph is, perhaps, unrealistic. And when you see your pictures 15, 17 or more inches across on your screen one can see why software writers have developed such good programs for viewing them on your monitor or TV. XP and Vista have great slideshow facilities as do most other graphics programs these days. So you may be tempted to spend some time on creating an on-screen album of your holiday. The impact of seeing your pictures so bright and so LARGE can make looking at enprints in a book seem even more boring than ever for your friends and relatives ! A program such as Roxio Creator 7 will enable you to produce a masterpiece which can be saved to CD or DVD and thus played on any PC or on a TV, using a DVD player in the latter case. The Roxio program allows you to add text and sound (music or commentary) and even provides some sample themes. Windows XP Picture Viewer is also an very simple way to show your pictures and its printing facility is excellent Lastly I really recommend the free program Picasa2 from www.picasa.com (see the download link next page). It has great (and simple photo editing facilities (see next page). It will allow you to email pictures in a compressed format - which should please people on dialup connections. Tip: If you want an easy way to shrink picture sizes just use Picasa to email them to yourself. And, if you want to show your pictures to all your friends it allows 250Mb of free space for a web album. Other sites where you can keep photos (and even video) safely on line are Flickr and Ringo.

Printing your photos. Computer Active did a comparison of costs and qualities of various printing methods. They dismiss colour laser printing for home use.  Although these printers have come down in price they reckon the quality is not as good as that you can get on a good inkjet printer using the right paper and inks.  But what about cost ? These varied from 25p (Epson Picturemate) to 78p (Canon DS700) just to print one photograph on individual 6 x 4" glossy paper. Apart from the work involved, and the possibility of poor results, this makes the hobby pretty expensive. But did you know that if you are having more than 50 photos processed at Boots they would come out at 10p each ! It is important to stress that is for 50 or more.  Any less will cost you twice as much. So, it is cheaper to get 50 done than to get 26 processed !  And you will get excellent prints on bright-white heavy-duty paper, unlike the flimsy, expensive 180gsm stuff you get in the computer shops These days you just take the memory card in and it will be downloaded to their machine in a minute. So you can get your precious memory card back and carry on shooting. Another company that came out well is Bonusprint at 12p for 20 - 50 pictures. Fotango charged three times that plus delivery. Kiosk printing, where you do it yourself, was much more expensive - up to 79p each for small quantities in some places.

If you do resort to printing at home you will find a tremendous improvement in the results if you print on heavy quality glossy paper. Try high quality 220gsm gloss paper, £5 for 50 from some shops.

Photo manipulation Another advantage of digital photography is that it gives the opportunity to enhance your photos. It is important to have some software that will enable you to do this.  If you ask the photographic processing company to put your pictures on a CD they often include some software free. I have mentioned 'cropping' a picture to cut out the spare sky and grass or unwanted parts of a picture. No-one is really interested in loads of space, especially on photos of people.  In fact no-one is really interested in knees and feet. What they want is a close up of Aunty Mae or the happy couple. You can experiment and save the bits of the photo to another picture file. In fact there is only one thing you must never cut out in portraiture and that is the person's eyes.   So crop away. Talking of eyes there is the frequent red-eye problem of flash photography, though most cameras can be made to prevent this by double flashing. A good photo manipulation program will also let you correct this. A bad one will make it difficult.  My favourite for this is Microsoft's Picture It Publishing but I gather that Hewlett Packard photo software does a very good job on this. Another feature of such programs is the ability to alter the brightness and contrast of the image.  Many a dull picture has been brought back to life by changing these aspects. Get Picasa2 and go through your dull old pictures and click "I'm feeling lucky". You will be amazed how they improve. But remember to save a copy or you will lose that effect. For more information on Picasa click here.

Other recommended packages for organising and editing photographs apart from the free Picasa2 (see next page) and Irfanview (free) or the paid for programs such as Corel Paintshop Pro (£100), Microsoft's Digital Image Suite (£70) and Adobe Photoshop Elements (£70) The last one was given a five star rating by Computer Active.

And don't forget that, if you want to send pictures to anyone who is on a dialup account, you are more likely to stay friends if you compress the file down to something that will only take a little while to send or receive. Files should finish up in the popular JPG format (never Tif or BMP) and they can be compressed to various degrees and also reduced in physical (inches) and Megabyte size. Many graphics programs can be used to compress photos before emailing and some such as Picasa will do it 'on the fly' when you opt to attach a photo to an email.  Make sure that you do not accidentally wipe out the better version when you save a compressed version.  Save it as another name - but still in the JPG format.  A program like Corel PaintshopPro X will 'Batch compress' dozens of photos and stick the compressed version in a different folder.  If you have it, see under File, Batch compression. You can just opt to Select All the photos in one folder, set the Option to compress them 85%, choose to send the results to a different folder, then hit Ok. Within seconds 50 photos were compressed from 400k to 50k. Unfortunately PSP is pricey at £100. But another program is recommended by Computer Active for batch reducing photos is Visualizer Photo Resize which can be downloaded free from www.computeractive.co.uk/2153384.

MEMORY One confusing aspect of digital cameras is the great variety of memory various ones use.  For  good explanation please take a look at http://www.steves-digicams.com/high-capacity_storage.html. Although this deals mainly with the very high capacity offers it also applies to all memory from 8Mb upwards. There are about a dozen different memory card types and they vary quite a lot in price but all have become much cheaper lately and have higher capacities.

Batteries. Apart from the cost of printing the only other expense of digital photography is the cost of batteries.  I have read an article in Computer Active about someone complaining that he has sent his camera back and had replacements three times as it would only take about 50 pictures before the batteries needed recharging.  I wonder if the camera actually had a problem. The things that use the most juice are the LCD screen, the flash and the use of any video facility. If possible they should be used without any of these. I have seen people using the flash all the time, when really it only needs to be on when 'in filling' to expose shadows on faces etc. Next, I have seen people who cannot resist showing everyone what they have taken, so they pass the camera around a large group of people who look at all the pictures. Then they wonder why the battery is flat. And, I wonder if they leave the camera connected to their PC after they have transferred the pictures. This can take power, too. In addition, I have come to believe that the batteries go down merely because they are left in the camera. So, I tend to take them out frequently. Lastly, people are not aware that rechargeable batteries are not quite as powerful as standard batteries and, in addition, there is a lot left in batteries when the camera will no longer work. So cameras require them to be in tip top condition, whereas batteries used in torches and toys carry on for much longer.  Please bear these points in mind before you return your camera to the supplier.  If you buy rechargeable batteries, get the biggest capacity you can find e.g. AA can be up to 2,400 mAh. And do carry at least one extra set - and still be prepared to have to nip in a shop and buy extra Duracells.  Do check that BOTH the batteries are down. For some reason one seems to be run down more than the other !  Get a battery checker.

One strange thing I discovered when getting a new Canon 7.1 megapixel camera was that if it was set at the maximum definition (as the camera was delivered) the pictures looked fine on the PC but when burnt onto DVD they appeared small on the TV, covering about a quarter of the screen (in the centre).  This does not show off the pictures as I would want. I found that, as with most cameras, one can change the definition and it will stay the same when you use it again. This is particularly important for people who do not have a lot of hard disk space. A recent camera has 12.1 Megapixels.  If set to the maximum definition, even with the massive compression afforded by the JPG format every picture will take many megabytes of space on the camera card and on the hard disk. Moreover, if no action is taken to reduce the size of the pictures you will be quite unpopular with email recipients, especially if they are still on dialup.

The results I got by experimenting were in no way logical and I set them out for your interest. Surprisingly even the lowest definition pictures looked good on screen

Camera Setting	Pixels	Size on hard disk	Size on TV	Size on PC	Conclusion
L	3072 x 2304	1.56Mb	Small	Normal	This is not suitable for TV showing
M1	2590 x 1944	987 kb	Full	Normal	This is the best compromise for both PC and TV
M2	2048 x 1536	686 kb	Average	Normal	Not suitable for TV
M3	1600 x 1200	456 kb	Small	Normal	Not suitable for TV
S	640 x 480	71 kb	Full	Small	Suitable for TV but not PC
Postcard	1600 x 1200	456 kb	Very small	Normal	Not suitable for TV
Widescreen	3072 x 1725	1,15 Mb	V. small and long	Full widescreen	Not suitable for TV. Good for widescreen PC

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