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Why go Digital?
Once you’ve taken your digital photograph, they are immediately in a format that’s easy to use and distribute.
For example, you can print them on your home printer, pop the memory card into your local processing lab just as you would have taken your exposed roll of film, insert them into word processing documents or send them by e-mail to friends and family all over the world.
You can see your pictures as soon as you’ve taken them on the LCD screen on the back of your camera, or you can connect your camera to a television and show them as a slide show.
Digital photography is instant photography without the cost of buying rolls of film and paying for the processing either.
Digital cameras are becoming more than just cameras, many are capable of capturing video and sound too.
The Three Steps to Digital Photography.
Your digital camera is just the first step in a chain; one that leads from the scene as you saw it, all the way through to the final photograph you stick in your album, send as an e-mail or proudly frame and hang on your living room wall.
There are three basic steps involved in creating and using digital photographs – these are :
Step 1 Input
Before the computer geeks took over the English language, we used to call this taking photographs, and as an old fashioned kind of guy, I’d still prefer to call it that. If I said to my wife ‘I’m just nipping out to input some stuff’ she’d probably think I’m even crazier than she already suspects. However to nip out and take a few photos sounds far more fun, and seems to make more sense too.
Of course what these bizarre geeks are trying to get at in their own way, is to explain to us less enlightened souls that to input something, is to convert from what we see to something a computer will understand. The beauty of this of course is we can not only record digital photographs, but also take our old slides, negatives and prints, ‘input’ them via a scanner and provide ourselves with a digital equivalent of our old film based photographs.
Step 2 Image Processing
Well this sounds a little more familiar doesn’t it! I can still smell the processing chemicals from my earlier years as a photographer, and sense my orange peel hands from having them immersed in chemically induced water for hours. I’d go to bed stinking of developer and fixer, goodness knows what it has done to my lungs, but hay ho.
Now processing your image doesn’t involve a darkened room under the stairs, or occupying the only bathroom in the house while the rest of the family hop round the landing hanging onto their nether regions while you watch the timer ticking down the minutes.
Once your photograph is in a digital form, you can store it on your computer, then edit and manipulate it with a photo-editing software like Photoshop.
The things you can do to a digital image is endless, you may just wish to crop it, or change the exposure a little, perhaps sharpen it or make it smaller for e-mailing.
Step 3 Outputting
Once your photograph is the way you want it, you’re ready to ‘output’ it and share it with the world.
There’s tons of ways to display and distribute your digital photographs, for example you could print them on your inkjet printer, or send them to a lab and have your pictures printed in the traditional way. You could post them on a website, email them to friends, or have them printed on a T-shirt to show off your photographic skills all summer. You can store then on a CD or DVD, or create a slide show for your friends to marvel at.