Go Wild With Your Digital Camera

Hi folks -- there was an article a few weeks back in Webmonkey entitled More Effective Images -- it's an excerpt from author Dane Howard's book on digital photography, The Future of Memories, and it talks about how adapting your shooting style to the freedom given by digital cameras can make you a more effective photographer.

For starters, with digital cameras, you don't have to shoot with your eye pressed to the viewfinder -- you can aim using the display, or even not really aim at all, which means you can get all sorts of  interesting angles without having to contort yourself into awkward positions.

Plus, if you're not squinting through the viewfinder, you're taking in more of the scene, so you might catch things you wouldn't see otherwise.

More importantly, he makes the point, as have others, that the economics of digital photos has radically changed the way we take pictures -- once you get past the initial expense of your camera and computer, shooting digital photos is essentially free.

You don't have to worry about paying for film, and the only real expense is the time it takes for you to review and edit the photos you take. And since you don't have to worry about paying for film, you'll be free to take more pictures and play around.

Let's compare the costs of film vs. digital: Say a 24-exposure roll of 35mm film costs $5. For $30, that's 6 rolls, or 144 exposures, at 21 cents a shot (not even counting developing costs).

Now, you can look around online and get a 1 gigabyte memory card for under $30.  I have one for my camera, which is set at the second highest resolution, 1600x1200 pixels, which is more than I need (for example, a typical monitor resolution is 1024x728 pixels) -- even at that resolution, I can fit 1,500 photos on the card.

That's a heck of a lot of photos.

(... oh, and a pixel is just a little dot that makes up a picture -- put a grid of 1600x1200 different colored pixels together and you have a picture -- that's 1,920,000 pixels, or 1.9 megapixels.

It's best to shoot at the highest resolution you can -- especially if you want to print out the photos later on -- because you can always shrink down and cropthe photos using photo editing software, but you can't make a small digital photo bigger and still have it look good.)

What all that means is you can take as many pictures as you like, without having to worry about wasting film. (When I take photos, the limiting factor I face is battery life, never storage space.) If you don't like something, you can always delete it. And storage space on your computer is relatively cheap -- you can transfer everything from your memory card to your computer's hard drive if you ever start running low.

Now, does this mean you can go completely crazy and shoot everything you see? You can if you like, but I don't see a point of taking a picture if you're never going to do anything it, and freedom to take more photos doesn't mean you can just shoot everything and hope you accidentally get something interesting.

It does mean, though, that you're free to take more photos of stuff, from different angles and different exposures -- you have more room to experiment and try new things out.

Plus, it means that instead of trotting out your camera just for special events, you can use your camera to find interesting stuff or document your everyday existence.

For example, if I had a film camera, would I take a picture of my ugly bare feet sitting on my footrest? Probably not:

(I wore my deck shoes for the first time this spring, hence the bare feet.)

Lastly, remember that you can always adjust what you shoot "in post" (as in  post-production), using photoediting software like Photoshop, Paint.net, GIMP, etc.

Anyway, just food for thought. Thanks -- Joe.

Tag: digital photos, webmonkey, future of memories