Digital Camera Master

The joy of taking digital photographs is that you can manipulate them easily. Once your camera is full of pictures, you only need to copy them to your computer in order to free up space to take more snaps. This means that transferring pictures from your camera to your PC is an important skill to master, but how good at managing pictures are the various version of Windows?

As Microsoft Windows has developed, its handling of graphical files has became better and better. There are next to no specialised photography tools in Windows 95. In Windows 98 there is a picture viewer, but you really need your own photo-handling software (most cameras come with a suitable program). Windows Me includes the Scanner and Camera Wizard (which you can launch through the Control Panel), thumbnail views in picture folders and an enhanced picture viewer.

When it comes to handling picture files, Windows XP is the best of the lot. Most common photography tasks are easily accomplished via simple wizards, and you rarely need to install a software driver - the program that tells your computer how to operate your camera. In this tutorial we’ll be using Windows XP to show you just how easy it is to transfer your digital photos from your camera to your PC. Once you’ve got the cable correctly plugged in, the rest is a breeze. The Scanner and Camera Wizard is easy to follow with clear step-bystep guidance.

However, there’s more to transferring photographs than simply moving pictures from camera to PC. You need to name the picture files suitably and place them in appropriately named folders so you can retrieve them at a later date without problems. Windows XP handles this job well, but you might have to adopt more discipline if you’re working with an older version of Windows.

CONNECTING YOUR CAMERA

YOU NEED A USB LEAD

Most current digital cameras use the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard. The most technical thing you really need to know is which cable to use and where to plug it in. Basically, the wider, flatter end goes into the computer and the smaller end connects to your camera.

PLUG INTO USB SOCKET

This may be located in front of, or behind, your PC. It will normally be labelled, but your cable is unlikely to fit in any other socket. When the cable is plugged in and turned on, Windows should detect the camera. In addition, Windows XP might recognise which camera you are using.

THEN INSTALL DRIVER

If Windows detects but doesn’t recognise your camera, you’ll need to install its driver and photo-handling software. There’s little more to this than popping the CD that comes with the camera into the computer’s CD drive and following the instructions it gives you.

The job of autoexposure is to regulate the amount of light entering the camera – too much and the picture will be too bright, and light areas will burn out to white.

Too little and the picture will be too dark, and the dark areas will hardly rise above black. In daylight, autoexposure should work okay, but shooting outdoors at dusk, it has a tendency to misread the conditions and make the picture lighter than it should be. In this case, you need to use autoexposure compensation.

Setting it to minus one should restore the scene to how it should look. The digital camera’s LCD screen enables you to view the picture immediately – I often hold it up next to the scene and compare the levels of light on screen and in reality. When they more or less match, you know you’ve found the right level.

F-numbers are found on lenses, and refer to the amount of light the lens allows to pass through – the bigger the number, the less light. They are similar to fractions, which describe a smaller amount as the number increases (though the relationship isn’t exactly the same).

Like the human eye, lenses have an iris that opens and closes, enabling more or less light to pass through the lens. The aperture, or ‘amount of open-ness’ (related to the Italian word, ‘aperta’, meaning open) is described by the f-number. If it is set at f2, (think of one over two or ‘half open’) then the lens is at its widest, allowing the largest amount of light to enter.

If it is set at f4 (one-over-four or ‘one-quarter open’), then the amount of light is reduced by half. On a zoom lens, the f-number increases as the zoom is extended. As you increase the amount of zoom, the area of capture (and thus the amount of light passing through the lens) is reduced.

If you’re using a zoom, there are two reasons for keeping the camera steady – there is less light coming into the camera, necessitating a longer exposure time, and because you are magnifying the central area, any camera movement will become more apparent.

Red-eye is caused when light from a flash bounces off the rear of the eye and back into the lens. Red-eye is at its most pronounced when the pupil is open wide and the flash is close to the camera lens. To reduce red-eye, move the flash away from the lens – ideally directly above – and try to make the pupils contract by increasing the ambient light or using a pre-flash or some other red-eye reduction method.

When you move back from your subject, the red-eye effect becomes more pronounced because the angle between the flash and the lens becomes smaller so that it is virtually the same, and this means the flash is firing directly into the eye.

The level of reflection can be quite high – like cats’ eyes. There is also a spreading of the light, making the white disc seem to take up the whole of the eye, which is a nightmare to correct through image enhancement.

On-camera flash is really only effective up to a distance of about ten feet. Try to avoid taking flash photos of people beyond that distance.

Looking at images on the web, I notice a huge range in image quality. A key factor is sharpness, and many photographs appear less sharp than they ought to be. People often say that my images are bright, punchy and appear to ‘jump off the screen’. The reason for this is careful manipulation of the sharpness.
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Like spectacles and contact lenses, camera lenses are manufactured with a special antireflective coating that helps to improve image quality. This multicoating is designed to improve both contrast and colour reproduction, yet is easily affected by grease from fingers. Once smeared with a tiny amount of natural oil from your skin, the performance of a lens drops dramatically, creating flat contrast images with washed-out colours.

If your lens does get inadvertently greasy, clean it only with special lens-cleaning tissues or, for more serious cases, an alcohol-free spectacle wipe. Tiny specks of dust, sand and human hair will reduce your image sharpness and this should only be removed by using a blower brush, available from all photographic retailers, or a soft artists’ paintbrush. Any grit or sand that comes into contact with your lens can potentially etch a permanent

Digital cameras use autofocus to remove the human error out of taking a picture. Most cameras have an autofocus target in the centre of the viewfinder that is best placed over the main subject and this works faultlessly – providing the subject is centrally placed. Autofocus is activated by half-depressing the shutter button and placing your subject in the centre of the frame, until a green confirmation light appears in the viewfinder display.

Autofocus is unable to focus on low contrast subjects like large areas of flat colour, and will track the lens back and forth in error. Solve this problem by recomposing and focussing on an edge of the subject, then pressing the autofocus lock on your camera. The lock holds the focus setting in place, so you can recompose and shoot more creative results.

Another common autofocus problem occurs when a subject falls outside the central portion of the frame and the camera sets focus on another object in the distance by mistake.

When you shop for a dSLR, you’ll find a bewildering array of options. Salespeople will hand you data sheets that describe in sometimes painful detail what the camera can do. In this section, I explain the major areas to look for when you go shopping for that first dSLR. By the way, this book’s Glossary is another source of information for unfamiliar terms.

Recording Medium

The recording medium is the type of memory card used by the camera, such as CF (Compact Flash) memory cards. The most common card is Type I (3.3mm thick), whereas some, such as the MicroDrive, are Type II (5mm thick). Devices equipped with Type II slots can also accept Type I cards, but not vice-versa. Other common types of memory cards used in dSLRs are SD (Secure Digital) and xD Picture Cards .
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Now that you’ve narrowed down your price-pain threshold, let’s look at underlying technologies. The type of image sensor in your camera has great impact on the quality of the images you get. The two primary sensor types are CCD (Charge Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor). CCD and CMOS differ in the ways they record and process light, but the basic layout and capture methods are similar.

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For most people, price is the most important issue when looking at a camera. Until a couple of years ago, you’d have to budget well over $1,000 to purchase a digital SLR and basic lens. Today a full-featured camera can be found for less than $600. Cameras in this entry-level category, such as the Canon EOS Digital Rebel line and the Olympus E Series, are optimized for ease of use while still giving you a number of advanced features and access to the full line of lenses.

Note

You’ll quickly discover that the camera body is often the least expensive part of your purchase. Lenses, particularly high-quality ones, can easily exceed the price of the body. The good news is that you can use your expensive lenses on a new body if you upgrade later.

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