Our technology surveys indicate 84% of Wabash faculty and staff, and 56% of Wabash students own a digital camera. If you’re like me, you tend to take lots of pictures on vacations and holidays, maybe look through them once or twice on your computer, but seldom do much more with the pictures.
With Wabash on spring break this week and lots of vacation pictures sure to be taken, it seems like a good time to share some tips on how to make the most of your digital camera.
Rather than one really long blog post, we’ll examine a different aspect of digital photography each day this week. Here’s the schedule:
- Monday: Buying a digital camera
- Tuesday: Tips for taking great pictures
- Wednesday: Digital editing tools
- Thursday: Printing pictures
- Friday: Sharing pictures online
One more thing. Do you have a great picture that you’d like to share? Send it to me (weaverb@wabash.edu) and I’ll post a photo album next week of pictures submitted by faithful “Tech Notes” readers.
2 comments on “Tech Notes Digital Photography Week”
Interesting exercise. Glad to see digital photography has made this type of exercise even more accessible to students. I hope your findings were helpful!
Brad,
This is a very helpful series and I’m glad you took the time and effort to share your thoughts and experience with the community. The handful of images you shared taken with your Powershot camera are impressive, and demonstrate that users don’t need $1000-plus Nikon or Canon SLR cameras to get good, quality images.
One word of caution that I would add for people interested in purchasing a digital camera or upgrading their current “point and shoot” model: As Brad says, megapixels are key, but don’t be fooled into a low-priced, high megapixel camera. If the deal is too good to believe, it’s probably because the lens — the most important element of any camera — is junk. My advice is always to sacrifice a couple of megapixels in favor or better glass. Most of Canon’s point and shoot models feature lenses designed by Carl Zeiss; Panasonic is using Leica lenses on many of its models; Nikon features good Nikkor lenses on most of its models, even at the low price end.
I made the mistake of purchasing a low-cost Kodak model with six megapixels for my daughter. The cost was about $150 as I recall. Yes, the images had very high resolution and we could routinely print 8×10 pictures. But who needs high resolution, large photos of soft, fuzzy, rotten images? I’ve since replaced her camera with a four megapixel model with a better quality lens, and we’ve been very pleased with the results.
“Try before you buy” is a good way to check out features of a camera. To determine how good the lens is, check out the links Brad provides in this series for performance comparisons.
Jim
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