How To Choose Digital Camera

Written by:
Peter Bargh, editorial director of ePHOTOzine.com
As the proud owner of a brand new digital camera you can take and share photographs with ease, especially when you’ve read this useful guide.

Prepare yourself
Before you take your first photograph it’s worth becoming familiar with the camera controls. If you’ve bought one of the latest models it may well be shrouded in buttons, functions and modes, making it look even more daunting to use than a video remote control. The fact is that there are only a few essential must-have buttons and the rest will come in more useful when you’re familiar with the essentials.
First things first, we need to power up. Many digital cameras come with special rechargeable batteries and these are usually uncharged fresh out of the box, so don’t expect to go straight out and shoot. You’ll need to charge the batteries for around two hours. It’s worth buying a spare too, because digital cameras tend to sap power quickly and you don’t want to be caught out with a powerless camera!
You’re no doubt aware that your digital camera doesn’t use film. Instead it stores photos as electronic files that can be recalled to view on the camera’s LCD screen, downloaded to the computer, emailed or printed out. The camera will either have built in storage space to hold these files or a removable memory card, which will come with the camera. The card slots into the camera and is often referred to as digital film.
Each card allows a number of pictures to be stored and is measured in size using the familiar computer term megabytes (Mb). A small 8Mb card only has space for a few pictures to be captured while a larger card of 128Mb allows around 16x more pictures to be stored. The supplied card will probably be either 8Mb or 16Mb, depending on the model, and sizes up to 2GB can be bought, depending on the type of card used. The good thing about a memory card is that it can be wiped clean and reused so it’s a one off payment and we’d suggest you add as large a card as you can afford to carry as a spare. You don’t want to run out of space!

A question of quality
Digital photos are made up of tiny coloured squares, called pixels, and generally the more you have in a photo the higher the quality. It’s the quality that you select when taking pictures that determines how many pictures you can squeeze onto a card. Digital cameras have a range of options, allowing you to select resolution (number of pixels created to make an image) and compression (the size of the file is reduce to when it’s saved).

If, for example, your camera is a three million pixel models it is capable of producing photos that are around 2048x1536 pixels when set on high resolution, but the same camera can be set to take pictures at just 640x480, and it may have intermediate options.
Then, by selecting the compression, you can make the file size smaller. Three options are usually available: Fine, Normal and Economy. Fine gives best results and Economy is a compromise on number of pictures you can take over quality so is best avoided where possible. When you change the settings you’ll see the camera’s frame counter change showing the number of pictures you can take, which will typically go from around 5 at high resolution to 46 or more at a lower resolution on the card supplied with the camera.
Check your instruction book for the table that suggest how many pictures you can take at different resolutions to help you decide what size card to buy as a spare.
It’s worth considering what you intend to do with your photographs before setting the quality, If you want to make enlargements, select highest resolution and the Fine setting. If you intend showing pictures on your PC, select a lower resolution and a Normal setting. Remember you can always resize a file to make it smaller later, but you should avoid making a file bigger, which will degrade quality making the resulting prints look soft.

Through the looking glass
The natural thing to do when taking a photo is to hold the camera up to your eye and peer through the viewfinder. Most digital cameras also have a second option – the large flat display panel on the back. Press the monitor or display button to activate this and it shows what the lens is seeing. You can compose the picture without having to have the camera up to your eye, which makes it easier to shoot from lower or higher levels, especially if the camera has a rotating LCD.

This LCD is also used to review the picture you’ve just taken. If you don’t like the photo you can delete it instantly and take another.

While this is a definite benefit you’ll soon realise its disadvantage – the LCD requires plenty of power and your batteries will soon be exhausted, so only use the LCD when necessary and avoid reviewing images regularly.

Also avoid over use of flash, as it’s a huge drain on battery life. Most digital cameras have long exposure modes that can cope with low light so it’s often possible to switch the auto flash off and achieve great results using available light, providing you support the camera to prevent camera shake. Most digital cameras have a white balance control that adjusts to ensure the colour of the photos come out natural. You can take pictures in artificial light and avoid the colour casts that you would see on film.
There will, of course, be times when flash is more appropriate, such as parties and functions, and several modes are on offer. Auto fires the flash whenever the light level is low, but flash can also be forced to fire to reduce shadows on a bright day or switched off to record a sunset faithfully.

Most cameras also have a red-eye reducing mode that fires a pre flash to make your subject’s pupils reduce in size before the proper photo is taken.
Take care to keep within the flash range. Most allow pictures to be taken up to three metres away, so the photograph you try to take of a person on stage or distant scene will not be illuminated correctly and will turn out dark.

Accurate exposure and focusing
Focusing is automatic but several camera can be set to manual which is useful if your trying to take pictures through a window or of a rapidly moving subject where auto would be fooled. An LED will flash to indicate that you have selected the correct distance.

More sophisticated digital cameras have a series of metering patterns. The common method is to take a reading from most of the image area, known as centre-weighted metering (yellow shapes on illustration), but a better setting is multi-pattern metering, which takes readings from several areas and calculates the best exposure (red shapes on illustration). Spot metering is useful when the subject is different from its surround, such as a bride wearing a white wedding dress with a dark church wall as a background (white shape on illustration).
If your camera has an +/- exposure compensation mode you can adjust this to make the picture darker or lighter if it looks wrong on the LCD preview. Some have an auto exposure lock (AEL) button that can be used when there’s a predominate area affecting the overall exposure, such as a bright sky. Point the camera down to the ground, press the AEL button and recompose before taking the picture to ensure the landscape appears correctly exposed.

You may also have a zoom lens. This allows you to adjust the angle of view and the magnification of the subject in the frame. Use this carefully to make your photos more impactful. A wider setting is useful when shooting landscapes and building to get as much in as possible, while a telephoto setting will help you magnify distant detail or crop in on a portrait like this picture on the right. Take care when to hold the camera really steady using the telephoto option as any camera shake will be magnified.
As you become more familiar with the camera, start to look at other modes and experiment. Some have a sepia option, others can record black & white, and the new Pentax models even have a stereo mode. You may have a movie mode where you can record and play back 15 to 30 seconds of action while more advanced models have settings to enhance or subdue colour and sharpness, but these things can be done using an image editing program on your computer later.

Seeing the pictures
With your pictures safely stored it’s time to consider what to do with them. The first thing is to download them onto you computer, so you can free up space on the memory card to take new pictures and print out the your favourites.
If you have access to a laptop computer or advanced PDA you can shoot and edit pictures while on holiday or on location and either save or email the results, but most of us will need to wait to get home to the computer.
Manufacturers have made it really easy for us to connect a camera to a computer using a USB lead. The supplied software helps you transfer the photos to a predetermined folder on your computer’s hard drive.

Kodak and Fuji take this a stage further on their latest models that have docking stations. With the you just pop the camera on the USB connected docking pad, press a button and the software kicks in offering a direct download of images from camera to computer, with instant e-mail resize or print options – it couldn’t be easier.
Some cameras can be plugged directly into a printer and the results can be outputted immediately without the need for a computer. Using technology such as Print Image Matching (PIM) you simply select which pictures you want to print on the camera and when attached to the printer it recognises these and optimises the quality settings.
If you prefer the comfort of letting your local processor handle your films you still can. Just think of the card as a film and take that in for processing. The processing machines now have card slots and can output pictures in minutes, and it won’t be long before ATM style machines are in shopping arcades for even easier access. Alternatively use one of the many new online processing services where you send your photos via the Internet and a set of prints are returned days later through the post – just like your ordinary mail order processing labs would do.

Other options
Digital photography offers many sharing options. You can be store photos in albums for easy access, produce automated slide shows that can be played on DVDs. You can send pictures as attachments, via e-mail or post up a selection of photos onto a Web page so others can view your artistic talents.
Creative photographers can import photos into an image-editing package and enhance them using automated or manual filters and commands. You can remove unwanted detail, combine elements from several photos as a composite, get rid of colour casts and red eye, make the picture look brighter, sharper, better composed, add a frame or add a caption.
Your children can even use the camera to help with school projects or homework by adding pictures into simple templates and combining them with text and graphics.
When you start to realise the potential you have in your digital camera you will soon realise it’s one of the best purchases you have made. Welcome to the future!

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