I got a new camera for my christmas present to myself. (I also got a nice hole in my bank account with it)
It’s a Nikon CoolPix 8800. (8MP effective, 10x optical zoom)
I’m getting used to it, but I am not quite at the stage where the camera comes second in the decision to take a picture. I am still in the stage where I am taking pictures for the sake of it/to get used to the camera. I have a couple of photography books which I now resolve to read from cover to cover. I felt like starting a catch-all thread about digital photography.
While we’re at it, do you know of any good high-trafic digital photography forums/message boards?
I also have two mini, one medium, and one large tripod. (the latter was a christmas present which gave me the push to get a new camera)
Well, your mega-pixel to Zoom ratio is very good, and should yield high quality photos. I hope you have a good printer…
I do not know any good forums for digis but Photography magazine has been an OG send for my wife and I. Somethings I would like to mention.
Get used to your settings, make good use of the speeds, and aperture settings, and experiment, experiment, experiment.
Also, if you do not have one already purchase a viewer device, as hooking your actual cameral up to the USB port in your computer can fry the chip inside the camera quicker than if you get a viewer for the digi-card. The salesman at best buy where we got our Nikon D70 told us this, and we lucked out as he was a very knowledgeable about digi cameras.
Digital photography can be frustrating. I would recommend that you shoot only in the highest resolution the camera can produce (.tif, for example). You can always compress the photo later for emailing, but resolution really suffers at the jpeg setting. Second recommendation is to buy a good program for photo enhancing. There are some good ones that won’t set you back a paycheck (like PhotoShop will).
My slight worry about using a card reader for the CF card is that the pins are so delicate. Constantly moving the CF card from one thing to another might one day result in a bent pin.
Your CF card is probably the least likely part of your camera to have problems. They are pretty bombproof, I’ve seen them driven over with a car and still work just fine. Feel free to use a card reader, move them from device to device, with utter abandon, you won’t hurt it.
IMO, there’s no problem with taking images in the highest possible mode (Superfine and Tiff) but it’s probably overkill and just serves to eat up disk space when you download them to your computer. I shoot one level below that (actually my camera doesn’t have Tiff) but will bump it up to Superfine when composing a really nice shot. For anything 8x10 or smaller you are extremely unlikely to note the difference.
Take lots of photos. Look at the full display mode with info on what the camera chose for F-Stop, Shutter Speed, and ISO choices. Gradually you can start using the manual modes and making those choices for yourself.
Digital photography isn’t that much different than film, nearly all of the same principles apply with slight modifications. You are still playing with light, framing, and composition. You can take great pictues with a single use film camera that you bought in a drugstore, and lousy pictures with a top of the line dSLR. The person behind the lens is still the most important factor.
I’ve never heard this before. Have you found any documentation to back up the salesman’s warning? I’ve been alternatively using my card reader and direct hookup to my camera for years with no ill effects.
I’m highly sceptical of this one. I’ve downloaded many thousands of photos direct from cameras of four different makers (Canon, Kodak, Olympus and Panasonic) over the past three years, and have never once caused damage top the camera. Nowhere in their product literature do any of them mention a risk of damage to camera by direct downloading, nor have I ever seen such a warning mentioned at any of the major digital camera review sites. If such were the case, why would the manufacturer put a USB port on the camera in the first place?
Until I see some documentation on this, I’d classify it as a variation of the “You need Monster cables to connect your stereo” upsell tactic.
Nah…nothing to worry about. I have never heard of anyone bending a CF card pin.
Your question is so open, I don’t even know where to start.
If you want to get technical, the greatest digital app out there (IMHO) is Picturecode’s Noise Ninja. I use it as a Photoshop Plug-In. It does an unbelievably impressive job in cleaning digital noise (or even film grain from negative scans) while retaining the original’s detail. Quite simple a kick-ass piece of software. Most digital cameras nowadays will have very little noise below 800, but if you routinely shoot at 800 or above, it’s an indispensible plug-in.
That’s probably more advanced that your needs require now, but I just want to put it out there.
But otherwise, I just have to second Telemarks’s advice: get to know your camera, shoot a lot, learn from your mistakes, etc, etc, etc. It really isn’t that much different than shooting film. Almost all the same “rules” that apply to traditional photography apply to digital.
Could it be that the guy at Best-buy wanted to make some more money on a card reader?
IN my experience (of computer shops in my case) the salesman can sound like he knows what he’s talking about while talking rubbish. I’ve humiliated many a salesman by poking holes in his pitch.
I learnt a few manual settings from my previous camera which I have been able to carry across to this camera (such as messing with shutter speed to produce darker/sharper pics as my old camera’s auto setting tended to be too bright)
I’ve been at work since I got the camera (working new-year for those who had to work christmas so we could be off) so the only oportunities I’ve had to use the camera have been on the way to and from work.
I never thought of looking at what the camera chose for settings. I’ll have a look.
I happen to like ArcSoft- PhotoImpression. It uses layers like PS and you can do almost any kind of editing you want. It is very easy to use and powerful to boot.
ACDSee is also my favorite photo organiser. You can do batch renames, batch resizing, and some editing. It has very intuitive and time saving keystrokes when you want to view and manipulate images on your computer.
Get a decent printer too.
I have a colour printer which I haven’t used for a while (It’s a cannon something. I can’t check because I’m at work) which is almost certainly inadequate for 8mp shooting. I tend not to print photos out, prefering to keep them on the computer.
My dad sends his cards (or cdrs) of pics to professional companies (the ones most people send their analogue film to) and he gets back some decent prints. Would you reccomend this for 8mp photos, considering that I’ll probably only ever want to get hard copies of the top 5% of the pics I take and keep?
I sure the guy at Best Buy could have been trying to upsell a cardviewer, honestly I never thought of it that way. I have a digital SLR Nikon D70 and love it. And after spending that kind of money on it I thought nothing of buying the viewer even it if does not take that much stress off the camera itself.
So you are all most likely very correct in saying that it was an upsell. However, I will look to see if I can find any documentation to back it up.
Your colo(u)r printer is probably not a photo printer. While many models claim to be a “photo quality printer” most are not. They will produce passable images on photo stock paper, but a 6 or 8 ink printer will do a much better job than any 4 color printer. The sites mentioned above have lots of discussion about printing. I like the instant gratification of having my own printer right there, but with the photo printing shops springing up everywhere you can easily get by without one.
Any 3-4 MP camera will be quite sufficient in producing up to an 8x10 image. The extra pixels from the 8 MP image will have essentially no effect on the final image. The advantage of the extra pixels is for printing much larger prints and for having lots of extra pixels so you can crop and still retain image quality.
Don’t fall into the trap in thinking that extra pixels will produce a better image. There are advantages of having the additional information captured, but the most important part of the camera is still the lens and the electronics and the brain/eye behind the viewfinder.
I realize that 8MP means more image data rather than ‘better picture’ but when I optimized (shrunk) my pictures from my (3mp effective) old camera to computer-screen sizes (or just viewed them at those sizes) I was still dissatisfied with the lack of sharpness/detail in the images. I’ve viewed a few of the 8mp pics on my computer at smaller sizes and I am more than satisfied with the results. Plus all the room I have to crop and play with the images.
Also, I was reasonably happy with the pictures I took with my old camera as far as the aesthetic merits of the pictures went, but I was always disappointed in the detail. This was my main motivation for getting an 8MP camera. Now I can continue to learn better picture-taking, and produce pictures that no-longer leave me with that one disappointment. Now I will only be disappointed in the aesthetics, which can be solved with practice. A crappy camera can’t be improved with practice.
I’ve been using Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 2.0, which is like a scaled-down version of Photoshop. But it’s still very powerful and will likely do everything an amateur (like myself) needs it to. And it costs a lot less (~$100, I think, but I got mine free when I bought my flatbed scanner.) I’ve also purchased an “Elements 2.0 for Dummies” book that has taught me how to do a lot that I wouldn’t have figured out on my own.
My new toy is a Kodak DX7590 5 megapixel 10X zoom digicam. Previously, I’d been using a barely adequate 5 year old 1.3 megapixel Kodak DC240 mostly for utilitarian purposes so the improvement in detail and colour fidelity has blown me away. My knowledge of photography is still pretty basic so I’m still experimenting with different exposure settings, shutter speeds, etc., but I’m gradually gettng more familiar with the basic principles.
Does anybody have any links to any beginner’s FAQs or guides?
As for photo-editing, I’ve been using PaintShop Pro 9. It’s far, far cheaper than PhotoShop but still retains a lot of power and flexibility.
I suspect that the better images you are getting are not a direct result of the number of megapixels but the fact that your new camera is better. I’ve taken wonderful pictures with my 2MP, my 3.2MP and 4MP cameras (and also lots of crap) so it can be done.
Full screen size (depending on your screen size) is probably pushing it for a 3MP, but you can still get excellent 8x10 prints from them if the original image is of high quality. Your camera may also have been compressing the images too much in JPG and you were seeing some of those artifacts.
Don’t get me wrong, more pixels are better, but better quality lens and electronics goes more towards pure image quality than just MP. My guess is your new camera is better than your old camera in all aspects.
