Intro Guide to Digital Photography and Image Manipulation with DigitalCreative.info

Not so many years ago, for most of us, if we wanted a record of the family holiday or special event, out would come the camera, usually 35mm, and in would go a roll of film for 36 slides or prints. Once the occasion was caught by camera, and the counter indicated that the film was full, it would be wound back into its little cassette. The next job was to send it off to a high street lab and a few days later a a box of slides or a packet of prints would drop back through the letter box ready for projection or sticking in the album. The photographer needed no more skill than that necessary to open the camera and post an envelope. Today, with the advent of the digital camera, things have become even easier in some ways but a little trickier in others ....... swings and roundabouts as they say!

Now you own a digital camera, which you have hopefully found as easy to use as the blurb and salesman promised, although you may well have still been a little overwhelmed by all the various functions and the software that came with it. Instead of a roll of film you now have a storage card; there are several different ones, but the more usual are probably a CF (Compact Flash) or SD (Secure Digital) card. When you first read your manual you'll get quite excited when you read that you can take dozens, even hundreds, of pictures and store them on just one card. Take time to think about this. Your memory card will have a certain storage capacity, usually given in Megabytes, eg. 64MB, 128MB, 256MB or 512MB. (They are also now being produced to hold multiple numbers of Gigabytes of information, eg., 1GB, 2GB and, at the time of writing in 2006, 4GB compact flash cards). This means, in theory, that you could take thousands of pictures on just one card! Be aware, though, that there is a significant risk in doing so. One important fact to remember is that, if all your important and unrepeatable pictures of this fantastic day, or holiday, are all on one card and if you either lose or damage it, then they've all been lost and it becomes a disaster. However, if you spread the images over several smaller capacity cards then at least you still have some record of the event.

A digital camera, like a roll film camera, has a lens that opens briefly to allow light bounced from the subject to enter the camera and be stored, so creating an image. In a digital camera the information is stored in pixels (colour information) which can be accessed at a later time to replicate an image of the subject. Each pixel stores a minute amount of colour information so, the more pixels there are, the more detailed the eventual image. A small print of an image file will only need a small number of pixels whereas, if you want a larger print, much larger numbers of pixels will be needed.

Introduction to Digital Photography