Digital Camera Master

If you are to buy a printer, you’ll want a printer with at least four ink colors. For colorful, crisp, and professional looking prints, choose a printer with at least 600×600 dpi (dots per inch). Remember, file size is very important. In order to achieve the best results, you should print your photo files with a resolution of at least 240. If you print less than that, you will get result with a noticeable pixilated look. Thus, the higher the resolution, the finer the printed image quality.

Picture 1. This Canon’s latest A3+ photo printer, the Pixma Pro 9000, is really rocks. But if you are to buy this printer, you should consider about your ink investment.

Read more »

As far as your computer is concerned, the photos from your digital camera are nothing more than files that happen to contain images. You can treat them exactly like any other kind of document file: Drag them into folders, copy or delete them, and so on. But pictures are different than other kinds of files, so along with a quick review of basic Windows file management techniques, this post shows you how to use Windows XP’s juicy new picture viewing features. Even if you use, say, Photoshop Elements or Picasa as your primary tool for organizing photos, someday you’ll inevitably find yourself shuffling photos between folders in Windows, so this post is worth a read.

——————————————————————————–
Tip:
Should you want to send your photo via fax, then you really choose the most reliable way to transmit your precious photos and image documents. There are many fax solution out there, but to make it easy for you, you might want to try fax solution from www.axacore.com. But wait, why would you need fax? Well, supposely you need to send a business document with some photo attached for quick review, and also with a signature request and at last, you need to have it returned to your desk in minutes. With this challenge, a proper fax solution could give you a great favor.

It is important to carefully look at the features offered by faxing and document imaging service provider. If you are looking a fax solution that is designed and optimized for Microsoft Windows that you are already familiar with, then FaxAgent from Axacore is the perfect choice for you. It can be neatly integrated with other application ranging from Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, Microsoft Office to Oracle and SAP, thanks to its native DotNet SDK.

One of the nice part of Axacore Fax Solution is that it has monitoring/tracking capabilities for your incoming and outgoing faxes before, during and after transmission. Moreover, you don’t need to re-transmit faxes that failed due to no answer, busy line, poor connection, and other non-fatal errors. With Axacore Fax Solution, you can send your image document such as GIF, PNG, JPG, and TIF files.

——————————————————————————–

1. Navigating the My Pictures Folder

When your PC slurps in pictures from your digital camera, it automatically places them inside a folder called My Pictures. The considerate designers at Microsoft have customized this folder for your photo-handling needs. For example: Read more »

Depending on your camera model, you can likely choose from two or more different file formats. Three basic types of file formats are offered on compactlevel digital cameras: .jpg, .tif, or a proprietary “raw” format. The most frequently used format is the .jpg format, which is a compressed file format. To make the image file smaller, a mathematical algorithm is applied that simplifies the image, thereby making it smaller. Simplifying an image also means that there is some decrease in image-quality.

Proprietary “raw” formats are file formats that are unique to a single vendor, such as Nikon’s .nef format, or Canon’s .crw format. Both are compressed, “raw” file formats. Unlike non-raw formats, where an image is taken and the camera processes it to get optimal results, a raw format image file is written to the digital photo storage media as it was captured on the image sensor without any additional processing. The advantage to these raw files is that you can use special software to adjust the original image parameters, such as white balance, contrast, sharpening, saturation, and so on. Because both .nef and .crw file formats have the additional advantage of also being compressed files, they take less storage space than an uncompressed file such as .tif, which is a common uncompressed file format found on digital cameras.

On those occasions where you want to maximize image-quality and you have plenty of digital photo storage media space, you should select either a .tif format or a proprietary format if one is available on your digital camera. Besides being compressed, someof the proprietary files use 16-bit images instead of 8-bit images—meaning that they contain much more picture information, which can be useful if you edit the image with an image editor that can work with 16-bit images. The downside of using a proprietary format is that you may need special software to convert the images so that you may view them or use them in other applications. Also, these image files can be very large.

So, pick the .jpg format unless you are seeking to get the best possible image-quality that your camera can produce and you plan on and are prepared to use an image editor to edit a .tif or proprietary image file. Be aware that the choice between a .jpg format and an uncompressed format like .tif is a decision between a relatively small file and a much larger file! Imagequality can be better but not necessarily significantly better.

For example, the same photo of a barn shot with a Canon PowerShot G2 using the “best” (least compressed) .jpg setting is 1.6MBs. The same image shot in Canon’s “raw” format (.crw) is 3.3MBs; when it’s opened up as a 16-bit image, it’s a whopping 22.2MBs!

Anonymous nude picture is really hot. And very popular, too. Digital cameras have done what is happening is serious only for spicy additional trade types in a art-lite sensation. This is not quite so outraged that the homemade porn with the family camcorder, but it is considered as definitively Steppin ‘Out, and through the creation of social networks, in no time at all your inner exhibitionist can find like minds, and eyes, doing nothing online and a step is the wisest.
Read more »

In this digital age, “on” and “off” are just too easy. Instead, your camera’s flash has three or more modes, each intended for a specific photographic situation. Here’s the rundown of your options. Your camera may not include all of these features, so you might want to check out your camera manual before you get your heart set on trying all of them out. Your camera should have some, if not all, of these modes:

Off
This one is easy. When you set your camera to this mode, no matter how strongly your camera believes that you need extra light, the flash will not fire. This is handy for situations where you are not allowed to fire a flash, such as in a church or a museum, or when you’re too close to the subject and think you might overexpose it. You may also want to turn off the flash in many night photography situations.

Auto
This is the standard mode that you’ll probably want to leave your flash in most of the time. When set to auto, the flash determines whether it needs to fire based on the amount of light in the scene. This is a good mode to use when you don’t want to think about whether the flash needs to fire. For typical snapshot photography, just set your flash to auto.
Read more »

What does it take to take a good picture? Certainly, it requires more than a mastery of your camera’s various controls. If that were all you needed, anyone who knew how to read a camera manual could be Ansel Adams. No, taking good pictures demands a little creativity and a touch of artistry. Perhaps more importantly, though, it takes a solid understanding of the rules of photographic composition and some knowledge—which you can acquire as you get better at photography—of when it’s okay to break those rules.

Composition is all about how you arrange the subjects in a picture and how you translate what is in your mind’s eye—or even right in front of you—into a photograph. After all, the camera sees things very differently than you do, and in order to take great photographs you have to understand that and learn how to see the world the way your camera sees it.

Taking a picture with a digital camera is really no different from taking a picture with a 35mm camera. That’s why in this post we will be talking about the rules of composition: what they are, how to use them, and how to break them. If you are already an accomplished photographer and you’re reading this blog to make the transition to digital photography, you may not need most of what I offer in the following post. But if you’re not an expert, I welcome you to study this post. It is only through an understanding of composition that your images will go from snapshots—the ones that bring comments like “What a nice picture of a cat!”—to potential works of art.
Read more »

Early digital cameras made a splash with their sophisticated new electronics, but their lenses were hardly state of the art. If you’ve ever tried reading fine print through a cheap magnifying glass, you have some idea of how the world looks though bad opticslousy.

These days, the scene is much sharper. Sony, Olympus, Canon, Leica, and Nikon all take pride in the lenses for their digital cameras, and they have solid reputations for great glass as a result. (Other camera makers often buy their lenses from Olympus, Canon, and Nikon.)

Read more »

In digital camera ads (or even on the camera itself) you see announcements like: “3X/10X ZOOM!” The number before the slash tells you how many times the camera’s lens can magnify a distant image, exactly like binoculars and telescopes. That measurement is called optical zoom.

Then there’s the number after the slashthe digital zoom. Camera boxes often announce digital zoom stats in big, gaudy type, as though that’s all their customers care about. Well, those are the same kind of people who buy into the notion that a higher megahertz rating always gets them a faster computer.

Truth is, digital zoom is nothing to write home about. When a camera’s digital zoom kicks in, the camera’s merely spreading out the individual pixels, in effect enlarging the picture. The image gets bigger, but the picture’s quality deteriorates. In most cases, you’re best off avoiding digital zoom altogether.

——————————————————————————–
Tip: If you’re used to traditional photography, you may need some help converting digicam optical zoom units (3X, 4X, and so on) into standard focal ranges. It breaks down like this: A typical 3X zoom goes from 6.5mm (wide angle) to 19.5mm (telephoto). That would be about the same as a 38mm to 105mm zoom lens on a 35mm film camera.
——————————————————————————–

The first number you see in a digital camera description is its megapixel rating. A pixel (short for picture element) is one tiny colored dot, one of the thousands or millions that compose a single digital photograph. (One megapixel equals one million pixels.) You can’t escape learning this term, since pixels are everything in computer graphics. The number of megapixels your camera has determines the quality of your pictures’ resolution (the amount of detail that appears). A 5-megapixel camera, for example, has better resolution than a 3-megapixel one. It also costs more. How many of those pixels you actually need depends on how you’re going to display the images you shoot.

1. Resolution for Onscreen Viewing
Many digital photos never get further than a computer screen. After you transfer them to your computer, you can distribute the images by email, post them on a Web page, or use them as desktop pictures or screen savers.

If such activities are the extent of your digital photography ambition, you can get by with very few megapixels. Even a $100, 2-megapixel camera produces a 1600 x 1200-pixel image, which is already too big to fit on the typical 1024 x 768pixel laptop screen (without zooming or scrolling).

Read more »

One of the first things that new digital camera owners love to do is send a batch of images to family members or friends. As you may have already discovered yourself, the warmth of reception is inversely proportional to the size of the images that land in your recipients’ inboxes.

All too often, budding photographers send full-sized 2-, 4-, or even 6-megapixel pictures as email attachments. Unfortunately, these files take forever to download on all but the fastest Internet connections and are too large to view comfortably on a computer monitor.

Indeed, you should shoot at your camera’s highest resolution, but remember not to send those full-sized images to others. All parties concerned will be much happier if you create much smaller “email versions” of your pictures and send those along. This technique is called sampling down. Here’show it works:

Read more »