BEFORE WE START. . .
some things you should know about me
I am not a great photographer, and I am not an expert in digital photography. I am here to help you learn some basic things and teach yourselves more. I will probably cover far more than you can take in tonight. Please ask if you have questions. I am also available for help in the library pretty much every weekday.
BUYING A DIGITAL CAMERA
When buying a new camera, especially your first, having a camera similar to ones owned by your friends or family can help a lot in the learning process. You can almost always get better deals financially buying cameras online, but make sure to go with a reputable and trusted online merchant.
some sources for reading about different cameras
- Digital Photography Review-a site that reviews digital cameras and allows you to evaluate them side by side
- Consumer Reports-the March 2005 issue has some quick picks for digital cameras, and there is a nice guide to digital cameras available for free on the website, plus lots of extras if you're a subscriber
- CNET.com-another digital camera overview, plus many, many, many reviews of different cameras (and pretty much any other electronic gadget you might want)
TAKING PICTURES
No matter what kind of digital camera you have, or how many bells and whistles it has, you really can just point and shoot and get a picture that you can then look at, upload to a computer, and print or send to friends. And best of all, you can take many, many pictures. You don't have to worry about wasting film! If you don't like a picture, you can delete it. I'm giving you lots of information about bytes and pixels and so on, and when you've learned to use your camera, you'll probably want to learn more about all this. But you don't have to know any of it to shoot pictures.
some vocabulary
- memory card-the card stores the pictures that you take, kind of like a disk for pictures
- USB/Firewire cables-your camera probably came with one of these kinds of cords, which you can use to transfer pictures directly from your camera to your computer
- card reader-used to transfer pictures from a memory card to a computer
how many pictures fit on a card?
| 640x480 (.3MP) | 1600x1200 (2MP) | 2048x1536 (3.3MP) | 2272x1704 (4.1MP) | |
| 16 MB card | 58 | 14 | 8 | 7 |
| 64 MB card | 241 | 61 | 35 | 30 |
| 128 MB card | 483 | 123 | 71 | 61 |
PLAYING WITH PICTURES
some computer vocabulary you should know
click, double-click, menu, scrollbar, toolbar, save as, select, copy, paste
from camera to computer
After you've taken some pictures, you'll want to be able to see them full-size, edit them a little, and share them with other people. Your camera probably came with a cord that connects the camera and the computer, which you can use to transfer the pictures. Here at the library we have a card reader, which is the kind of thing you will find at camera stores or Wal-Mart. You can take the card out of your camera, put it in the card reader, and upload the pictures to the computer that way. You are welcome to come use the library computer to upload and edit your photos, but we don't have a photo printer.
free photo editing software
If you get really, really serious about digital photography, you'll probably want to invest in Adobe Photoshop, in which case you'll also want to find another digital photography teacher. For most of us who just want to take snapshots and then make them look a little better, there are several very good free photo editing software options. Your camera also probably comes with its own software, so that's another possibility.
You can edit photos with many different programs, but a lot of the functions are the same, or similar. Tonight we'll be looking at Picasa and learning to crop, retouch, and export. There are many more functions that you can play with.
for Windows
for Mac
- QuickImage CM-a nifty browser-based photo editor
- iPhoto-comes installed on newer Macs
some digital picture vocabulary: file types
We will be working almost exclusively with jpg (sometimes written jpeg), although you will sometimes run into these other formats: tiff, gif, bmp, png, psd, pdf. If you're really interested, you can see examples and read lots more about them.
SHARING PICTURES
You can, of course, print pictures and share them with family and friends the old-fashioned way. But with digital pictures you also have other options.
e-mailing pictures
Sometimes this is the best way to share pictures with other people. Beware, though, that pictures can be very, very large files, which can make it difficult for some people (especially those without broadband internet connections) to view them. You should save pictures you plan to e-mail in as small a size as you can and still have acceptable quality. 640x480 pixels is good. (To save a picture at a smaller size, select the picture and choose "export image" from the menu of most photo editing software. That should bring up a window that will allow you to choose how many pixels you want the picture to be.)
sharing pictures on the web
There are also many free sites that allow you to share pictures on the web. Some of these are more private (Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish) and some are more social (Flickr, Yahoo! Photos), and you can usually choose how public or private you want to make your pictures. They all work in similar ways. We'll look at a couple tonight.
STORING PICTURES
The average digital file lasts 3-5 years. If you don't want to lose your photos, you should make sure to store copies of them in multiple places. Some of your options are- online service-a photosharing site like Shutterfly or Flickr
- computer hard drive-on your computer at home (as many as you have room for) or on the computer here (a few is okay)
- CD-if you have a CD burner included with your computer, you can burn photos to a CD. You can also usually do this at photo processing places like Wal-Mart, or you can order CDs or prints from many online services.
some other resources
Are you exhausted yet? :-) If not, here are a couple other things that might be of interest.
- an article on digital photo project ideas from AARP:
- an article on settings and files sizes from Seniornet
