Digital Photography is a different way of taking pictures
1. High quality camera and printer hardware are relatively inexpensive.
2. The digital photography process is liberating.
3. Your electronic photo library requires some management.
4. You can scan old film negatives to add them to your electronic library.
I can help you manage your electronic picture library and convert your film negatives.
When you shoot your first digital photos it is liberating. You feel free to snap more photos since you are not paying for film and film processing services with each shot. You simply delete the bad photos. As a result you can take more photos of the same situation, throw out the ones where someone’s eyes are closed, and as a result you end up with more shots that are keepers.
You won’t print every picture and store them in a drawer somewhere. Instead you will be able to have your computer display them as a slideshow when you aren’t using it. This is the coolest part of electronic photography, putting your computer to work displaying your photo album instead of rarely seeing the prints.
You can easily share your pictures through email or even post them onto a website like www.ofoto.com.
Camera technology is changing faster than computer technology. At a minimum seek a 3 Mega pixel (3 million dots) camera. Look for a camera that includes at least a 2GB FlashRAM card (or plan on buying one), which is where your pictures are stored as you snap them. This will give you enough room to take about 1000 high quality pictures before you need to move them to your computer hard drive. Also strongly consider true optical zoom to help you better frame your subjects without having to move them or yourself. Cameras of this type can be had in the $300 range.
Good inkjet printers can be had for $150. As you pay more the printers typically print faster, not necessarily at a higher quality.
Printing on good quality glossy photo paper can cost about $1.00 a print, so you will probably only print special shots. You can also take your electronic pictures to a traditional photo processing lab for printing.
Once you start viewing photos on your system, you might be motivated to convert your old pile of negatives into electronic form. The process for this is to feed the negatives into a specialized film scanner. The optical quality and speed of film scanners varies, and prices range from $300 to $1500+.
Consider using a professional to convert your negatives:
Instead of driving to and from the photo processing shop, you take some time to organize your photos on your computer.
You unload your photos from your camera onto your computer, then empty the camera so you can snap more shots. I typically put each download set into a separate directory file folder under MyPhotos, and name it with the date and an added word or two like: MyPhotos2010.11.1.halloween
You can then uses software to review your photos, delete the poor shots, rotate any that are sideways, and even print a few of your favorites.
There is plenty of free software on the web to help manage your photos. You can crop your photos, brighten or darken those with a slightly incorrect exposure, and even eliminate red-eye.
I recommend using Google’s Picasa program to easily manage your photo library:
You want to have a good backup system in place so you don’t lose your electronic photo library. Check out my thoughts on backing up your computer.