The Savvy Marketplace

Out of the Box

Despite its diminutive size, the Samsung i5 is one solid camera and feels great in the hand. The large 2.5″ LCD display is huge, especially when you consider that the entire camera is only 3.53″(w) x 2.35″(h). The camera comes packaged with a compact docking station that is designed to stay connected to your PC. When you place the Samsung i5 on its cradle it automatically allows you to transfer your photos and videos to your PC, while simultaneously charging the camera. The docking base also has a connector for TV hookup. Both cables that Samsung include with the Camera, the USB and the AV cable can be connected directly to the camera for those times when you don’t want to take the docking base with you.

50MB Internal Memory

Unlike most manufacturers that typically supply a paltry 16MB memory card, the Samsung i5 comes standard with 50MB of internal memory - enough to hold twenty 5.0-megapixel images (Super fine mode), 39 in Fine mode, 57 in normal mode, or up to 3 minutes, 38 seconds of full-frame 640×480 MPEG-4 video. The advantage of having some internal memory is that you’ll always have it with you - assuming you don’t leave the camera behind. The camera also features a standard SD memory expansion slot, which accepts larger memory card. SD Memory cards are available in sizes of 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, and even 2GB.

Layout and Design

The Samsung i5 has an overall height and width are not much larger than a business card, which makes toting the camera around a pleasure. A matter of fact, put the camera into the included pouch (which has an integrated belt loop) and you’ll truly forget that you’re armed and ready to go.

While the camera does feature plenty of scene modes, options, and overrides, Samsung simplified the design by limiting the amount of external controls. The i5 is housed in a stainless steel body and as previously mentioned is available in silver, black, and red. The front of the camera features just a sliding lens cover, which hides and protects the lens, flash, and AF assist light when the camera is turned off.

Features

SCENE MODES:
The Samsung i5 has a good selection of scene modes to satisfy most every shooting situation. The only mode that Samsung neglected, and one that I have never seen left out of a camera, is a “sport” mode. A sports mode would force the camera to use a higher shutter speed in order to help “freeze” faster action. Since the i5 lacks a sports mode or any way to manually increase the shutter speed, the i5 is probably not the camera to get if you take a lot of sports pictures.

MACRO MODE:
The Samsung i5 offers an excellent macro mode, actually three macro modes. The Auto Macro Mode works automatically and allows the camera to focus as close as 2″ (5 cm) from the subject when the camera is at wide angle or as close as 20″ in the telephoto position. If you switch the camera to Super Macro Mode the camera can then focus on subjects as close as 0.39″ from the lens. Super Macro Mode is superb at capturing the finest details from subjects, even small ones such as coins, jewelry, stamps, etc,. The standard Macro Mode is similar to Auto Macro Mode in that the camera can focus as close as 2″ from the lens. Unlike the Auto Macro mode which automatically focuses from 2″ to infinity, the standard Macro Mode focuses from 2″ to 20″. While on the same subject, the Super Macro Mode is used within the .39″ to 2″ range.

Conclusion

There is a lot to like about the Samsung i5 and a few things not to like. The camera performed satisfactory under most lighting conditions, but performance was only average. Start-up time was fairly quick at 2 seconds, but shot-to-shot times were very slow. Even in continuous shooting mode the best I could achieve was 1.5 seconds between shots and in this mode the screen goes completely dark while the camera captures frame after frame. Since you can’t see exactly what the camera is capturing after you press the shutter release, the continuous shooting mode is more pot-luck than anything else. In single-shot mode, it took the camera about 2.5 seconds before it was ready to capture another image. Shutter lag was almost a full second, a pretty slow time when compared to other newer cameras in this class.

Now for the good news. The stainless steal body, sleek compact design, internal 3x optical zoom lens, layout and overall feel, docking station, rechargeable battery, 50MB of internal memory, integrated lens/flash cover, large 2.5″ TFT color LCD display, easy-to-navigate menu system, and 30 fps MPEG-4 video mode with audio and zoom are reasons to consider the Samsung i5. The camera also features a superb super macro mode which should be considered if you often take pictures of small objects (think ebay auctions). Long exposures (night mode) seem to be one of the high points of the Samsung i5. A 12-second exposure taken in a dimly lit room yielded bright, sharp, clean results. This was very unexpected especially considering the camera lacks a tripod mount - a necessity when shooting with long exposures. To get around the lack of a tripod mount, use a bean bag or table along with the self-timer to keep the camera steady when shooting.

The camera’s large 2.5″ TFT display was bright indoors and out, although the LCD was not as visible when trying to frame scenes at night. The camera slides into the docking base with the LCD facing the front, making it a convenient way to do an informal slide show or connect the docking station to a large screen TV for slideshows that have impact.

If you’re looking for a pocket-thin camera that balances features and image quality, has very good slow-shutter (night) performance, and is fun to use, then the Samsung i5 is a camera to consider.

Review by Ron Risman, Cameratown.com
www.cameratown.com
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After spending a significant amount of time taking pictures, and accumulating a large library of images, it can be a daunting task looking for a way to sell your work.

With the right approach and a vast amount of hard work you soon may see a return for all the hours spent outdoors.

One of the easiest ways to begin with is holding a local gallery in your town hall, inviting all your family, friends, and especially local businesses.

This first gallery can be used as a learning point. The place where you make mistakes, but you should learn from them. Good friends will understand or even make fun at your mistakes, but will know it’s the start of a new business.

When selling prints in a gallery don’t make unnecessary claims about the durability of your prints. Give advice on how to take care of the prints, such as: don’t store them in humid conditions or don’t expose them to direct sunlight. Try to print on good quality paper.

Choose your time carefully when holding your first exhibition. Don’t hold it in early January; most people spend a lot of money over Christmas and don’t like spending too much in the new year. Pick a time where there’s a lot of visitors coming to your town. Local images should sell well with tourists. Don’t try selling an image that you think is just “OK”. If an image isn’t good enough to hang on your own wall at home, it is not good enough to be exposed to the public.

There are plenty of other ways to sell your photography. Stock Agencies require a minimum submission of 500 - 1000 images, and regular submissions thereafter, with very low returns. Sometimes it’s better to go it alone promoting your own work, especially if you’ve got the drive to become a salesperson. And no better place to start than in your local town with your first exhibition.

After getting the feel for exhibits, there is no reason why you can’t go to other towns or cities. Galleries all over the world are always looking for new upcoming photographers.

There are no rules to what makes a picture sell. Sometimes having them in the right place at the right time can attract a client or customer. Images are used throughout the world to sell products and ideas, and there’s no better place to start than with your local community.

If your pictures are good enough to be entered in competitions, or hang at home on the wall, they are certainly good enough to sell.

TJ Tierney. Award winning Irish Landscape Photographer. If you are looking for more tips visit: Photo tips. To view some of his images visit his on-line gallery: Pictures of Ireland

It seems for every year that goes by digital camera manufacturers are adding one more Megapixel (Mp) to their cameras. Could it be true that an existing 7 megapixel camera that’s on the market now had an equivalent model of 6 megapixels last year and 5 megapixels the year before that? Next year, will you see the same camera in an 8 megapixel version? Where will we be in another 10 years time?

But do we need the latest 8, 10 or even 12 megapixel camera? Well I have two answers for that question:

Yes, a.) You’re a professional photographer and often have to produce very large high quality prints. b.) If you love to have the latest and most up-to-date gadgets and technology, and are quite happy to spend the extra money to get it, and a little extra more to store those larger files.

No, because the biggest photo that I’ll print will be A4 or 10×8 and a 5 megapixel camera is more than capable of producing a quality photo at that size.

Let’s assume you’re not a professional, because if you were you wouldn’t need to read this article in the first place. So how many megapixels should you go for?
My short answer would be anything between 4 and 6 megapixels for an amateur who isn’t going to print much larger than A4.

Megapixels and Print Sizes
2Mp - Perhaps you have a camera on your phone. You wouldn’t want to get prints larger than 6×4.
3Mp - Will give you great 6×4 prints and good quality 7×5 prints too.
4Mp - Will give excellent 6×4 prints, great 7×5 prints, good quality 9×6 prints and passable 10×8 or A4 prints.
5Mp - Excellent 7×5 prints, great 9×6 prints, and good quality 10×8 or A4 prints. If your printer is capable of printing edge-to-edge photos then 5Mp will be your starting point.
6Mp - Excellent 10×8 or A4 prints, quality 15×10 prints and good prints up to A3.
7Mp - 8Mp - You must be a very keen on photography and looking for the best of kit.

Remember, the more pixels in your picture, the more storage space you’ll require and depending on the chip inside the camera it may take longer to process and save your files. This lag whist the camera is processing and saving the picture can be quite annoying if you like taking quick snaps. Some budget brands suffer badly from this.

To summarise, I recommend you stick with a quality brand and go for somewhere between 4 and 6 megapixels.

Bill Thomson has been a keen armature photographer for more than 20 years and runs the website http://www.got2know.co.uk Find out more on digital cameras at http://www.got2know.co.uk/digitalcameras.html
You may freely use this article if you keep the included links.

Everyone likes what they like, “I don’t know art, but I like know what I like!” Okay, true that. When shopping at a market full of photo prints, you’re bound to fall in love with some images and then get your heart broken by the prices these starving artists have applied! So what’s artistically likable and what’s a price doing so far up there?

Ages ago, before phones, Internet and coffee shops, all people could do was paint and sculpt and pass on diseases for a good time. Two text book philosophers wondered what made some art so universally appealing and they wandered the known World to discover and formalize most of our Western rules of composition. They noted chiaroscuro, strong diagonals, repetitive shapes, leading lines and a zany but easy to find, ‘Rule of Thirds.’

Chiaroscuro was the 2D portrayal of objects using plenty of shadowed values giving a rich, almost 3D experience; the first buzz-through noted this as ‘full range’ in photography. Strong diagonals is just what it sounds like with dynamic, heart thumping lines racing across canvases and causing excitement in the minds of viewers. Repetitive shapes almost made patterns that mezmorized viewers and contributed to the balance of an image where a rectangular shape would appear over and over in different forms; or a circle or a bird shape, etc. Leading lines depended upon perspective illusion so that viewers felt they could travel into an image; walk down a path, through an orchard of trees or along a brick wall.

Following The Rule of Thirds is the fastest way to stop taking ordinary snapshots. The entire canvas or frame is overlaid with an imaginary tic-tac-toe board. Nine squares are the results of two lines across and two likes up and down. There are four intersections around the center square. It’s at these intersections that the focus or idea of the image is placed. This is the cure for the painfully dull “centeritis” that snapshots suffer from. It’s the most effective form of composition and the biggest secret weapon of artists. You’ll now notice movie characters off-center, magazine ads obeying this rule and some of your favorite photos employing some of these devices!

So why the $350 price tag at the market? In two paragraphs you just learned how to shot with wisdom and forethought… If they sell one image that week, they make rent. Perhaps the chemicals they used added up to gallons just to print three acceptable images. If the photo is from a far away land, you know they didn’t just beam there, they probably suffered expensive plane trips, lodging, walks through wilderness, tundra or alien cities and might have eaten food while they were away despite their scrawny, artistic-like appearance.

There is every reason to think that they should, finally reward themselves, but not by robbing children of college educations. Take a chance and make an offer. Ask for two prints and thirty or forty percent off. A little note saying ‘all prices firm’ indicates a trust fund baby. They already made rent, they would rather have the story of having sold a print for hundreds of dollars. If you give them the story, you’ll not be thanked, you’ll be ridiculed over caviar and Cheerios while some underground 80’s rock band guitars ‘cultured’ madness in the next room when they get home and call their friends.

Less than a hundred bucks is madness. Chemicals, developing, film, travel and talent are just too expensive to sell short. It’s not insane to think that three or four rolls of lovingly shot film produced nothing to sell. If you find a photographer with a few good prints overall and a low, three digit price tag (unframed), you’re probably face to face with a very respectable and honestly hardworking artist. The rule of thumb is that one roll might yield two to four keepers. One in five keepers are worth selling to strangers. So a little understanding of why you like what you like, a warning of when you’re being fleeced and a little sympathy to the deserving artist in the markets we all love wraps up this essay.

Bryan makes a living teaching and writing about computers regularly for Dinarius, Inc. but still applies his years of photography schooling from time to time. Other free stories and witty advice is available at http://www.Dinarius.com

Remember the good old photography days?

Film camera in hand, you would see that perfect landscape, seascape or sunset and shoot off several shots.

Perhaps a couple of weeks later, once you had returned home and finally finished that 24 or 36 exposure film, it was off to the photo-lab to get the film processed.

You eagerly open the packet of photographs, looking for that superb seascape you took, knowing that it would almost certainly be taken up by National Geographic for their monthly magazine spread.

What do you find?

A not too bad photo, but the seascape horizon is crooked, here’s your excuse, I hear you say.. “Well when I took the shot I was standing on the side of a sand dune and quickly trying to get that perfect shot while the little sailboat was still in view”.

Does this sound familiar to all you budding Adam Ansels and/or Lord Snowdons?

The photo is relegated back to the packet never again to see the light of day.

I had many of those packets of not so perfect photos until the digital photography age arrived.

The Digital Darkroom has arrived

The advent of the digital camera and in fact, before that, computerized image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop has completely revolutionized the way we can now resurrect a stunning image from what at face value might have appeared to be just one of those snapshots to be relegated to the shoebox under the stairs.

What I’m going to show you in this article is just one method of taking a mundane snapshot and producing a great shot in as little as five minutes.

The example I’m going to use, is one that I have seen so many times, and have already mentioned above, namely, shots that have crooked horizons, whether this be a landscape, seascape, sunset or whatever.

The source of the image may have come from a scanned negative, scanned print or digital camera image all converted to an image format (most probably .JPG pronounced “jaypeg”) that can be opened in your image manipulation software.

Correcting a crooked horizon

The human eye is remarkably perceptive at picking out features in a photograph that are made up of essentially straight lines and that those lines are not parallel, either horizontally or vertically, with the overall print itself.

These straight lines may well be the horizon, but they may also be an object in your photo that has straight lines such as buildings or walls etc…

I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS, but almost all other image manipulation software packages have similar tools so the method described should be repeatable with your own software package.

The method used will employ a little known relationship between two Photoshop functions, the Measure tool and the Rotate Canvas command.

Step - 1
Open up your image in your image editor (in our case Photoshop) and select the Measure tool which if not visible on the Photoshop toolbar can be found by hovering your mouse over the Eyedropper tool and “left clicking”.

Watch the other options window “fly-out” and select the Measure tool.

Step - 2
Interestingly enough, we are not actually going to measure anything in the real sense of the word, nor use the Measure tool as it is usually used (i.e. measuring the distance between two points within the photograph).

With the Measure tool active, “left click” and “hold” on a spot on the left hand side of the photo (remember our example is a seascape) where the horizon meets the sea.

While still “holding down” the left mouse button, drag to the right hand side of the photo and find a corresponding point where the horizon meets the sea and then release the mouse button.

What happened? .. Well you will see that a white line has been drawn on top of the photo with what looks like little “+” anchors at each end. The line is parallel with our crooked horizon.

Step - 3
Now the marvel begins!! Select the Image->Rotate Canvas->Arbitrary … command and the Rotate Canvas pop-up window will appear.

What you will notice (in the case of Photoshop anyway) is that it has “pre-filled” the pop-up rotate options with the exact rotation information to correct the crooked horizon, 1.5 degrees counter-clockwise in our example on our web-site. Click OK and see what happens ..

The photo has been magically rotated the right amount to correct the crooked horizon!

Step - 4
All that is required now is to do a tight “crop” on the overall photograph and save it.

And there you have it!!
Less than five minutes of digital image manipulation to take that mundane snapshot into a photograph that is very pleasing to the eye.

If you find the steps taking are a little hard to understand in this text based article, you can click on the link at the end of this article to see the same method explained on our website with the aid of example graphical images.

© Gary Wilkinson 2005 - All Rights Reserved

You can see this correction method complete with example images at Correcting Crooked Horizons in Photos

Feel free to re-print this article provided that all hyperlinks and author biography are retained as-is.

Gary Wilkinson is a photographer, photographic restorer and the owner of a photographic retail business.

He is also the publisher of the http://www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com website, where other methods of correcting common photographic restoration problems are discussed.

When using a digital camera to take action photos you will notice that there is a delay between the time you press the shutter button to the time the camera actually takes the photo. In most cases this delay is small enough and not noticeable but when taking action photos, when trying to capture an event that just happened or when trying to capture a moving object this delay can result in a photo that just missed the action. In this article you will better understand what causes the shutter delay and how you can overcome it.

A shutter delay is defined as the time gap between pressing the shutter button to the camera actually capturing the photo. There is no shutter delay in film cameras as in these cameras the shutter button is virtually connected to the shutter itself and holding down the button results in the camera taking a photo immediately. In digital cameras the shutter button is connected to a built-in micro computer and holding down the shutter button initiates a series of events that result in capturing a photo.

When you press the shutter button the camera goes through a series of setup events in order to get all its electronics ready. Only when these events are finished can the camera capture the photo. The time it takes for the camera to complete these events can vary but is usually around one second or so. When taking subsequent photos there is an addition delay as a result of the camera compressing the photo and writing it to the slow flash memory.

Although a circa one second delay does not seem long it can make the difference between capturing an action photo to missing it. Some cameras will also initiate a focus process when the shutter button is held down and will only take the photo when the focus is completed. This can add even more delay.

Although it is impossible to remove the shutter delay in your camera there are few practices that can help avoiding its results. For example many cameras include a burst mode. In burst mode the camera shoots a fast series of photos for as long as the shutter button is held down or until the camera’s memory is full. In this mode the camera writes the photos to a temporary memory which is very fast but small. When the shutter button is released or the memory is full the camera starts the slow process of writing the photos to the flash memory.

Using the burst mode you can shoot fast photos of an action event and then choose the one that best captured the events. The speed and the amount of photos that the burst mode supports vary between cameras. Some high end cameras can take as much as ten photos over the course of one second.

Another delay that is a result of the digital camera technology is the Initial Delay. Most cameras will enter into a standby mode if not used for a certain amount of time. This time can vary but it’s usually in the few minutes range. When the camera goes into standby mode it turns off most of its electronics in order to save power. Usually pressing the shutter button will restart the camera but such a restart process is long and can take a few seconds. The result is a longer delay when taking a photo after the camera was idle for some time. In order to avoid this you would have to make sure that your camera is turned on and does not go into standby mode when taking action photos. Some cameras allow you to disable the automatic standby feature through a menu option. If your camera does not allow that you can keep it on by pressing the shutter button half way down every now and then. The downside of leaving the camera on all the time is wasting battery power. In order to maximize battery life in such scenarios you can disable the camera’s LCD screen which consumes a lot of energy and use the view finder instead.

Another way to minimize the shutter delay is to avoid the automatic focus process which usually starts when the shutter button is held down. One way to do that is to hold the shutter button half way down. In most cameras the result will be a one time focus process and then a focus lock. The camera will stay in focus and when the shutter is fully pressed it will take a photo without re-focusing. Another option is to put the camera in manual focus.

It takes practice to get to know your camera and to get a feeling of the delays it introduces. Although there is no way to completely get rid of the delays you can master overcoming them by practicing taking action photos. New high end professional cameras have a very short delay and as the electronics improve cameras will eliminate the shutter delay altogether.

Ziv Haparnas is a technology veteran and writes about practical technology and science issues. This article can be reprinted and used as long as the resource box including the backlink is included. You can find more information about photo album printing and photography in general on http://www.printrates.com - a site dedicated to photo printing.

It is easy for the newcomer to photography to feel a little intimidated when thinking about getting a camera. There is such an array of models to choose from and such a lot of information available about each camera. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of techno-babble talk which can scare the living daylights out of even a hardened enthusiast.

Unfortunately, photographers themselves do not help the cause sometimes. Scaring off novices with complex jargon and undecipherable chatter can only make it more difficult to attract newcomers and these latter people are the ones that can make the hobby even more interesting and widely available.

Luckily, digital cameras are simple to use. The complexity of the instruction manual is tempered by the facts that (a) nobody reads them and (b) you can take a decent picture without ever opening it. The beauty of the instruction manual is not helping someone to use the camera in the first place, but by encouraging them to advance themselves once the basics have been mastered.

There is a moral obligation on all of us to ensure that the rapid progress in photography over recent years doesn’t backfire to the extent that novices are overawed by the prospect of joining in. It is fortunate that commercial pressures are such that good and trustworthy cameras are targeted to novices as well as the more experienced.

Eric Hartwell runs the photography resource site http://www.theshutter.co.uk and the associated discussion forums as well as the regular weblog at http://thephotographysite.blogspot.com

Do the digital camera review rounds as part of your homework before deciding on a digital camera, and you are going about it in the right way. Looking through the many available professional reviews, is time well spent.

However, you will want to be careful about rating the reviews themselves. Some digital camera reviews take a genuine, in depth and objective look at the camera, whereas others are little more than marketing exercises by agents!

The digital camera reviews you will find about some of the very latest digital cameras, are often based on pre-production models made available to the reviewers. In most cases this should present no problem, as the reviewers who get hold of these cameras are generally knowledgeable individuals, and will point out potential problems that still need sorting out.

Take seven snapshots of any digital camera review, to make sure that the reviewer has given you enough information to be able to compare cameras.

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 1 - Pixel Power: Is it a 5MP, or 6MP, or 8MP camera? What is the size of the image sensor (CCD)? How does it compare to other cameras in the same range? Remember, the number of pixels is not the only important aspect for a better image - you also have to check the size of the CCD.

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 2 - File Format: Which file formats are supported? Only JPEG, or also RAW? Many photographers are now waking up to the post-processing possibilities of RAW files, and you may want to have that option available!

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 3 - Lamp For Light: Does the camera have an auto-focus assist lamp for low lighting conditions? Without it you are often fairly restricted in low light situations.

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 4 - Battery Backup: How about batteries? A proprietary battery can have a very effective life span, but they tend to be expensive - and you do need a backup for when on the road or in the mountains. Many excellent digital prosumer cameras, such as the Olympus SP500 Ultra Zoom, work on simple AA batteries which you can easily replace when in trouble!

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 5 - Focus Feature: If you buy a good prosumer camera with which you want to do some experimenting (and being able to experiment is a major plus of having a digital camera in the first place!), you will want to know that you have a manual focus option for those tricky situations…

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 6 - Manual Makeup: What is mentioned regarding the camera’s manual settings? Can you set shutter priority, or aperture priority? Do you have full manual control over the most important aspects of exposure? It will be a pity if you start shooting away, trying new things you never dared with your film camera (costs!), only to find that you have virtually no manual control!

Digital Camera Review Snapshot 7 - Zoom Zone: Ensure that the review you are reading points out the important optical (real!) zoom capabilities - and not only gloat about the digital zoom facility - which is sometimes little more than a cropping tool!

Lastly, compare not only cameras, but also digital camera reviews. Shop around for the most informed opinion, before you decide on the camera…

For more information visit Best-Digital-Photography.com

Rika Susan of Article-Alert.com researches, writes, and publishes full-time on the Web. Copyright of this article: 2006 Rika Susan. This article may be reprinted if the resource box and hyperlinks are left intact.

With so many camera models to choose from where do you start? Well, the way I choose any new toy these days is to start at the end. What do you want it to do? Err . . . take pictures. Yes but what kind of pictures and what are you going to do with them? The other burning question is how much are you prepared to learn?

As you are reading this and have actually made it to paragraph two, I think we can assume that you are prepared to learn at least a little. So what do you want to do? Do you want something that you can keep in your pocket at all times so you can snap the kids? Do you want a camera that will allow you to take pictures in any lighting conditions from any distance (with the right gadget screwed on the front of course)? Is this going to be a hobby or just some quick snaps?

The Learning Curve

I haven’t seen any cameras on sale in recent years that do not have a fully automatic ‘point and shoot’ mode, most will automatically switch on the flash for you when it is needed so you may wonder why we need all the other manual and semi automatic modes and an instruction book to make your head spin. The answer is that, although the camera can produce good exposures most of the time, there are times when, to get the results we want, we have to apply a little knowhow and select more appropriate settings than the camera would automatically choose.

Before choosing a camera with lots of knobs and dials it is a good idea to consider whether you are ever going to bother to learn what they are all for. I’ve been around cameras for many years now, and I’m still learning what all the settings on my latest camera actually do. I never bother to learn how to do something until I need to. So there are certain obscure settings that I have yet to find a use for. Of course it would be nice if we could choose just the buttons we need and have each camera custom made for us but in the real world all we can do is choose the level of control based on how much we think we might want to get involved. Generally speaking an SLR will have more knobs, dials and menus than a compact camera which will give you more control over your pictures but will have a much steeper learning curve.

SLR or Compact?

All the cameras on the market can be categorised into a few simple groups. The most important two groups are fixed lens and interchangeable lens. The fixed lens cameras tend, with a few exceptions, to be smaller, lighter and more pocketable, therefore you are more likely to have it with you when you need it. Well that’s the theory anyway but I think we can say that you are more likely to be bothered to take it with you on that outing to the beach or the zoo.

However even with today’s zoom lenses, which are pretty wonderful, you will often find that you are too far away or too close to get the picture you want so you need to be able to change the lens for a longer telephoto or a wider angle. The other major advantage of these single lens reflex (SLR) cameras is that you are actually looking through the lens instead of a separate viewfinder so what you see is what you get, although this is less of an issue now that we can review our photos on the screen of the digital camera. The down side of these SLR cameras is that you very soon end up with quite a heavy bag of gadgets and are less likely to carry it everywhere with you. However much I yearn for a compact camera for it’s handyness I know I would be frustrated by it’s shortcomings so for me the choice is SLR every time.

Digital or Film?

Do they still make film cameras? Oh yes they do and I wouldn’t mind betting that they continue to do so for many years and I wouldn’t mind betting that at some time in the future there will be a retro backlash and a large number of ’serious’ photographers will return to the darkroom. Some will probably claim that they have never used digital at all, ever.

You might think from the remarks above that I am a diehard supporter of film. Nothing could be further from the truth actually I am now fully converted to digital and loving it. I am going to make the pros and cons a separate discussion that will be posted soon but, for now, I’ll just say that I am completely sold on digital and do not feel that I have lost anything significant by changing.

Which brand?

This, of course, is the big question that you really want an answer to and you know that nobody is going to give you one. If you ask anyone who already has a camera most will support the brand of the camera they have unless they have had some trouble with it, even then people are very forgiving. I think the reason for this is that people think that, if they have made the wrong choice it is because they have somehow failed, and they are not going to admit their failure. Back in the 1980s I had a camera shop in England and at the time a lot of people, who already owned an SLR, were buying compact cameras ‘for the wife’. They would ask me which brand was the best and, if I didn’t already know, I would discreetly try to find out which brand of SLR they owned, then I would recommend the same brand of compact camera.

Trying to sell them another brand was like telling them they had made a wrong choice when buying their old camera and was likely to lose me a sale. So I’d better have a really good reason for not recommending the Canon, Olympus, Nikon, Pentax or whatever and I didn’t have one. All of the well known brands produce similar cameras at similar prices and, by and large, you get what you pay for.

I will stick my neck out a little bit here and say that in my humble opinion the manufacturers who make the best film cameras the Japanese Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Minolta and the German Contax and Leica seem to make the best digital cameras. I would not be too happy to put my trust in brands whose traditional expertise is in other fields when there are such good cameras available from the traditional sources. I will probably get a lot of hate mail from people who have bought Sony cameras or Hewlett Packard and are perfectly happy with them. If I wanted a printer Hewlett Packard would be top of my list and I am a huge fan of Sony video and TV equipment but my first choice for a digital SLR would be one of the names mentioned above.

How Many Pixels?

Until recently the quality of digital cameras was measured by how many pixels they boasted. Now we have cameras that can produce tens of millions and it has ceased to be the only test of quality. In the real world the number of pixels you need depends on how big you want to print your pictures. If you mainly want postcard size or A5 then I would consider 4 million pixels to be perfectly adequate. Even at A4 size I would be hard pushed to tell the difference between my 4 million pixel camera and my 6.5 million pixel camera. Don’t forget though that your cropping in the camera may not always be perfect so you may be enlarging only a portion of the image and so only using a portion of the available pixels.

Although an adequate number of pixels is important, the quality of your picture will be greatly affected by the quality of the lens. When Canon recently updated the EOS 300D (digital rebel) with 6.5 million pixels to the EOS 350D with 8 million pixels, the general consensus amongst reviewers seemed to be that the money you needed to spend on an upgrade would be better spent on a better quality lens. So the answer to the pixel question is that we seem to have now reached a point where enough is enough.

There is also a school of thought that we have reached the limit of the number of photo sensors that we can fit on a chip and that a greater number will cause the individual cells to be too small compared to the space in between them. Usually though, when someone says something like that, the following week the boffins announce a breakthrough which makes it all nonsense. You may have seen adverts for cameras, costing many thousands, that have 16 or 20 million pixels. These have sensors that are twice the size of those in the consumer cameras, hence the price. To me, the resolution of a 6 or 8 million pixel camera with a decent lens seems good enough for most purposes and on a par with the quality I used to get from a 35mm film camera.

In the past I have spent a lot of time and money in the pursuit of ultimate quality, I have owned a 5×4inch plate camera, a Hassleblad and two Mamiya medium format cameras, every major brand of 35mm camera and in the end, I would be hard pushed to tell you which photo on the wall was taken with which camera. A fellow photographer once observed that photographers tend to smell pictures rather than look at them, by which he meant that they were more interested in the graininess and sharpness of the image than the actual image itself.

Geoff Lawrence has been a professional photographer for many years and now runs a website http://www.geofflawrence.com offering advice to people who want to improve their photography.

Every digital image has a secret identity.

The big difference between your digital photos and a CIA operative is that it’s pretty easy to discover the secret identity of a digital photo.

This not-so-secret information is called EXIF data, and it’s encoded in every photo that you take with your digital camera.

Think of it like a barcode on a package: in the same way that the barcode uniquely identifies the product, EXIF data uniquely identifies an image.

But how can EXIF data improve your photography? Let’s find out.

Common Camera Settings

There are two principal actors in the photos that you take: aperture and shutter speed.

Aperture is a measure of how wide your lens opens, and shutter speed is how long your camera’s shutter stays open to expose the digital sensor to light.

All digital SLR cameras and some compacts let you manually control aperture and shutter speed.

The best way to learn what impact these two features have on your photos is to tweak the settings and see the effects.

With film, there is no way to tell what the aperture and shutter speed are set to for any given image. If you want to keep track, you have to write down the numbers on a notepad for every shot you take.

Not exactly convenient.

On a digital camera, the EXIF data takes care of this for you.

Permanent Setting Storage

Every time you take a photo with a digital camera, the camera automatically saves the aperture, shutter speed, and a variety of other settings.

This EXIF data is permanently attached to the photo, so even when you transfer it from camera to computer the data is not lost.

Once you open the photo in your image editor of choice, you can choose to view this EXIF data any time you want (even a year later).

Here’s why this is such a powerful learning tool: you can easily review all of your camera settings for every photo you take.

Learning From EXIF

Example one: you take what you think is a great photo of your daughter playing in the living room. You check the photo on the computer and the entire shot is blurry.

Why? Check the EXIF data and note the shutter speed. It was probably too slow to get a clear shot of your daughter in motion.

Example two: you take a photo of your friend in front of a fountain. It looks like the water is spouting from the top of his head.

The EXIF data shows that your aperture was set to f/11. This aperture ensures that both the friend and the fountain are in clear focus. A different aperture setting would have kept your friend in focus but blurred the background.

While you can learn a lot from mistakes like these, pay special attention to photos that are successful.

Check the EXIF data often for photos that you love, and you might find some camera settings in common.

In the future, you can manually set your camera to your “favorite” settings and capture more photos that are keepers.

There you have it.

EXIF data just helped to improve your photography.

Chris Roberts dispenses practical plain-English advice and information about digital SLR cameras at the Digital SLR Guide. His 5-week ecourse in digital SLR technique helps beginners get the most out of their digital SLR cameras.