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Hello,
This week's newsletter is about Digital Cameras. I hope everyone in the US has a wonderful Fourth of July weekend. Next week's issue is about Creating a Budget and Budgeting Software Reviews. If you have any tips to offer on that subject, please submit them.
Thanks for reading,
Susan
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Digital Cameras
Tips for using digital cameras. Post your ideas.
Use Rechargeable Batteries
Digital Cameras can be power hogs, so I keep a couple of rechargeable batteries ready to use in an instant to save my photos and to take new ones. The rechargeable ones will pay for themselves over and over.
By Susan J from Hamilton
Taking Pictures with Digital Cameras
Has some great tips on taking digital photos. There is even one about taking pictures of fireworks!
http://malektips.com/digital_cameras_help_and_tips.html
Online Book on Digital Photography
Here is an online book on digital photography. There are many topics covered here and as far as I can tell, all of the information is online. Just about anything you ever wanted to know about digital photography, different types of photo files and choosing a digital camera.
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Submitting Digital Photos to the Photo Contest
We get many different sizes and shapes of photos for our contest. The best advice we have is send the photo larger than 500 pixels wide. That gives us plenty of size to work with. We resize nearly every photo, so even sending them full size is okay.
To view previous photo contest entries go to:
http://www.thriftyfun.com/Photos_1144.html
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Tips to help you when buying a digital camera. Post your ideas.
Shopping For Digital Cameras
Digital cameras prices are coming down in price, but you still need to shop around, and that's easy to do on the internet. I personally like Staples because they have the instant, on-the-spot rebates. But they are just one place. Just SHOP AROUND, 'CAUSE PRICES ARE COMING DOWN.
By Ardis Barnes
Digital Cameras - Zoom and Megapixels
If you'd like to sell jewelry on ebay, I have been told that it takes 10x optical, minimum 3 megapixels to capture the finer detail. I don't own a digital yet, because I am waiting for prices to drop. At the time of the inquiry at a professional camera shop, 4 MP were the maximum and the cost was over $1,000. Prices have since come down substantially and I am wondering if the 10x optical has been reduced in favor of a higher MP.
I have read that the higher MP's are just regular MP's made smaller, and less useful. That a 3 MP with standard sized MP's, is more useful than something with many more MP's that are less than standard size. How you would find this out, I haven't the least idea, but it bears thinking about.
I know that the digital power of a camera is less impressive than the optical power. Digital zoom just means enlarged (which becomes fuzzy when a larger picture is made) and optical means better focusing. So buy the most optical zoom you can afford and ignore the digital.
By Holly
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How to Organize Your Digital Photos
Tips to help you organize your digital photographs. Post your ideas.
Organizing Digital Photos
To maximize the original card that came with my digital camera, not only do I only take pictures on the highest setting, I save all the photos to blank CD's to print later. Sometimes I do not know when I will use certain photos but I still want to keep them. I categorize the disk with events and years plus I have some separated by each kid. This has come in handy when wanting to make slide shows or historical collages. I just print them and still have them for later!
By Kimo in Texas
How to Organize Your Digital Photos
By Gary Hendricks
If you're like me, you may have taken tons and tons of digital photos with your trusty digital camera, but never took the time to organize them. It's certainly not a good idea to have thousands of photos lying in your hard drive totally disorganized. For one thing, it's going to be very tough to find a specific photo for viewing purposes.
So what can you do to put those photos into some semblance of order? Well, this article will show you how, so read on. We'll assume Adobe Photoshop Album is used as the photo management program of choice.
Step 1: Get a Good Photo Management Program
The first step in organizing your precious photos is to get a good photo management program. Some people maintain that you don't need a dedicated program to organize your photos - they prefer to use native Windows XP features to do the organizing.
Personally, I think a dedicated, commercial grade program is better since they are usually more user friendly and there are a host of extra features (e.g. the ability to catalog and backup your photos). Currently, my favorite program for organizing photos is Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. You can also consider an alternative option, Ulead Photo Explorer 8.5, which is equally good.
Step 2: Bring your Photos into Photoshop Album
Now the next thing you need to do in the organization process is to import those pictures into Photoshop Album. If your pictures reside in your camera, then make sure you hook up the USB cable between the camera and computer. Then click on the Get Photos button with Photoshop Album. If your pictures are already in your computer's hard drive, then click on From Files and Folders in the menu.
I guess it's appropriate to introduce my folder structure for digital photos. I use a very simple folder hierarchy. In my computer's C: drive, I have a folder called 'Photos'. Under 'Photos', I have 3 subfolders.
* Raw photos
* Edited photos
* Unsorted photos
The 'Raw photos' directory stores all original versions of my pictures. This means they have been untouched by any image editing program. Assuming I had 50 photos in my collection, I'd name the photos here in running order using filenames like PIC0001.jpg, PIC0002.jpg, PIC0003.jpg - PIC0050.jpg.
The 'Edited photos' directory will contain only the edited versions of my images after perform edits like cropping, sharpening or red-eye removal. Following the above example, if I only edited PIC0001.jpg and PIC0003.jpg, then only these two files would appear in this folder.
The 'Unsorted photos' directory is sort of a temporary area I use to store any new pictures imported from the camera. After I import the pictures, they may have funny names like IMG001.jpg, IMG002.jpg, etc. What I usually do is to rename them according to my convention in the 'Raw photos' folder. In the above example, I would name the photos in the 'Unsorted photos' directory as PIC0051.jpg, PIC0052.jpg, PIC0053.jpg, etc.
Step 3: Tag your Photos
With your pictures imported into Photoshop Album, you can begin the tagging process. What's that you ask? What's tagging? Well, tagging is a cool concept found in photo management software. What you do is to attach descriptive text called tags (e.g. 'Uncle Joe', 'Robert's Birthday', 'School Play'), to each photo in your collection. When you do this, you no longer need to worry about a picture's filename, folder or date. All the need is the tag that you entered.
For example, if I had a tag called 'Uncle Joe' attached to 30 pictures in my hard drive (regardless of their filename, which folders they were in or when they were taken), all I need to do is to search for the tag 'Uncle Joe; in Photoshop Album. The program will automatically locate and retrieve those 30 pictures for my viewing pleasure.
OK, back to Photoshop Album. If you have existing tags, you can attach them to your photos by dragging and dropping them on individual photos. You can tell that a photo has been tagged if there is a small icon shown in the photo's thumbnail.
If you don't have an existing tag, you can create a new one choosing the Tag > New Tag option from the menu. You're allowed to specify the category of the tag (e.g. People, Places, Events) and can enter the actual tag keyword, along with a note for describing the tag.
Step 4: Move Your Photos to Appropriate Folders
Once you've tagged all your photos in Photoshop Album, it doesn't matter where they reside in the computer's hard drive. If you've just imported a new batch of photos, you can proceed to now move your digital photos to whichever folders you want. For me, I'd first rename any new photos in my 'Unsorted Photos' folder, then proceed to move them into the 'Raw Photos' folder.
Step 5: Edit Your Photos If Necessary
You can perform basic image edits like rotation within Photoshop Album itself. Basic image editing functions like rotation, cropping and red-eye removal are readily available at the click of a button. You can find out more in my photo editing guide here.
Step 6: Backup All Your Photos Regularly
Within Photoshop Album, there is a function to regularly backup your entire photo catalog. All database information (in particular, tag information) will be backed up as well. You will want to get a CD burner, DVD burner or even an external hard drive to cater for this purpose.
Conclusion
Taking the time to organize and clean up you digital photo collection is a worthwhile investment. By tagging your photos properly, you'll be able to retrieve images in a snap. No more sifting through folders and image files to locate that specific photo. Try the above organization tips out and I'm sure your digital photo experience will be that much more rewarding. Good luck and have a great time organizing!
Gary Hendricks runs a hobby site on digital photography. Visit his website at http://www.basic-digital-photography.com for tips and tricks on buying digital cameras, as well as shooting great photos.
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The Beginners buyer's guide to digital cameras or The Ins and Outs of Megapixels.
By Warren Lynch
The most important part of buying a digital camera is making sure that the one you select meets all of your needs.
Digital Camera 101
Better digital cameras uses a chip called a "Charged Coupled Device" (CCD) instead of film. Light enters the camera, through the open shutter, and strikes the CCD where it is converted to digital data before being stored in the camera's memory.
While that is the simple description, things can get pretty complicated from there.
Megapixels & Resolution
Resolution is a measure of how many pixels are used to make a digital copy of an image. Pixels are tiny dots of light that make up a digital image.
The quality of a digital camera's image is usually measured in 'Megapixels' where each megapixel represents one million pixels.
Here's how to determine how many megapixels you'll need depending upon the type of photos you will be taking and what you intend to do with them.
1 megapixel
Almost obsolete, you might still find these in cell phones, PDAs, and desktop "web" cameras. They're OK if you only intend to email pictures to other people and those people aren't going to be printing them.
1.1 to 2 megapixels
Only slightly better than the 1.0, this resolution is OK for an average 4x6 snapshot, but it isn't going to be a production quality image.
2.1 to 3 megapixels
This is the beginning of the decent camera range. You get very good 4x6 images and reasonably good 5x7 images. These cameras are low cost and provide a good platform for beginners.
3.1 to 4 megapixels
You are qualified to say that you have a "pretty good" camera. You get professional quality 4x6 images, real good 5x7 and 6x9 shots, and somewhat decent, but not great 8x10 images.
4.1 to 5 megapixels and up
People will be saying "Hey, great pictures!". You can count on professional images all the way up to 8x10's. Of course, as the megapixel count goes up, so does the price.
If you are only going to be viewing your pictures online, such as posting them at a photo site or using them on your web pages, keep your money in your pocket and pick yourself up something in the 1.5 megapixel range.
If you will be shooting pictures that will be printed at a print house, such as for brochures, postcards, etc, then you will need at least a 5 megapixel camera if not higher. Of course, you'll also need to have a fat wallet or a lot of open to buy on your credit card because, even thought prices are steadily falling, these puppies aren't cheap!
Once you've solved the megapixel puzzle, the rest of a digital camera's features, such as lens types, storage capacity and shutter speed are pretty routine and easy to understand. You shouldn't have a problem deciding on those features.
Warren Lynch has been shooting commercial photography since 1979. Clients include Several Regional and National accounts. Sign up for "The Digital Dose" and receive his tips every other week for FREE! http://www.photopheed.com
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