Digitial Cameras
presented by Dana Trout and Sue Rudnicki

A couple months ago, the DTP SIG meeting on the publishing industry, with a guest speaker from a small publishing house, drew over 60 attendees to the large meeting room at the Goleta library. That was a record for one of our SIGs, and it was, in fact, larger than most of our general meetings. This month, Dana scheduled a meeting on the subject of digital cameras, and tips on getting the most out of them. The prior record was not only broken, it was doubled! I counted over 120 people, obviously more than half standing or sitting on the floor in a room with a seating capacity of about 50.

Dana's wife, Sue, was given a nice very compact little 2.2 megapixel digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 775. She loved it, but found that its use had some new challenges, compared to previously used film cameras.

It uses batteries quickly. The only practical option is to use a rechargeable battery, with at least one fully-charged spare for a modest day's shooting. The LCD display of the image is the primary culprit. It permits inspecting an image immediately after it is shot, so one needn't waste precious image-storing capacity on unsatisfactory shots. That is a wonderful feature, but it soaks up battery power.

Another challenge was the choice between image quality and quantity. Images are usually stored in camera on memory cards. The 8 or 16 MB capacity of the cards included with the camera purchase are totally inadequate if resolution suitable for prints is the objective. A pixel typically uses 3 bytes of data, uncompressed. The large number of images advertised is only available with compression and greatly reduced resolution, suitable for wallet-sized prints, or Internet display. The usual recommendation is to buy one or more 64 MB cards for a day's shooting. 128 MB cards are not excessive. And that assumes there is a laptop or other computer available to dump the cards to the computer hard drive.

Another issue is the limited speed of the zoom lenses on the pocket cameras. A typical digicam will have a lens with a maximum aperture of ~f:4 at the wide angle setting, and ~f:11 at the telephoto end, leading to slow shutter speeds. Since camera shake is aggravated by the narrow coverage angle with a telephoto lens, there are two factors combining to make it especially difficult to get a sharp picture. Dana demonstrated a monopod that collapses to a readily carried unit, that opens out to eye level for shooting. While not up to a tripod in steadiness, it can help a lot.

I was allowed to show my own favorite aid, a small sandwich bag containing ~4 oz of rice or barley, taped shut. The 'rice bag' can be carried in a pocket and placed on a firm support, like a tree trunk or the windowsill of a parked car, placing the camera firmly on the bag will permit shake-free support for any length of exposure required.

Dana then demonstrated how a seemingly failed image can be rescued in Photoshop, or other image editing tool. The sample was a shot where the people were severely underexposed so that the subjects could not be identified. Using Photoshop, Dana was able to dig the image out of the darkness, to the point where a print could have gone into a family album.

There was much more, but the essence of the evening was that there is a tremendous and rapidly growing interest in digital photography; that the necessary techniques are enough similar, and enough different, from film-based photography to require rethinking many details, and the available tools for the 'digital darkroom' make for exciting new possibilities for great images by the average person.