  After you've installed the program which came with your camera, and you've ready to take some pictures, it's time to decide just what you'll want to do with them. We'll show you some things you need to know about digital images you take with your camera. Copying Images Off Your Media Card If your computer has a card reader that will accept the media card from your camera, there's no need to install a program or use a cable to transfer your pictures to your computer. Just remove the card from the camera and plug it into the card reader. The first time you do this (especially in Vista) the computer will need to find the 'driver' programs to make the card work. It will ask for the CD which came with the camera; you don't need this. Just choose 'show me other options' and choose to browse your computer for the files. Navigate to the 'C' drive and let it search. It will find all the correct files, although you may have to repeat this process up to five times as it searches for the necessary drivers. Be patient; after you're done, the next time you insert the card, its contents will open automatically! Image Size Depending on the quality of the camera you've purchased, it may be able to take images in a variety of sizes. The setting you choose should be determined by what you plan to do with the photographs. If you plan to print some of your images on special photo paper, the camera should be set for the highest possible image quality and size. This will ensure that the images you print are as close to photo-quality as possible. Even with a very cheap digital camera and inexpensive printer, the largest image setting will give you beautiful photos up to about about 8x10 inches in size. However, be aware that printing your digital images is more expensive than developing a roll of prints from a 35 mm camera. An inexpensive printer uses a lot of ink ... you may only get 10-15 full page prints from a cartridge of ink. Factoring in the cost of special paper, as well as the cost of an ink cartridge (about $40), printing standard size photos (2 per page) will work out to about $1.50 - $2.00 or more per print. You're paying for the convenience of being able to choose and print your own pictures. The advantage to you is that you can use an image editing program first to crop and improve your photos before you print them. If you do this, you need to be aware of the limitations of different image formats ... Image Formats The images your camera stores and downloads to your computer are probably in JPG or JPEG format. You can tell by looking at the endings of each image; the pictures names will look something like this: can0904_001.JPG can0904_002.JPG can0904_003.JPG If you can't see the .JPG endings on your images in the folder, you need to turn on 'file endings'. Open 'My Computer' and click on the 'View' menu. Choose 'Folder Options'. Under the 'View' menu here, make sure 'Hide File Extensions for Known Types' is not checked off. Images in JPG format are compressed to save space on the camera. When you're working with them on your computer, every time you edit a photo and resave it, a JPG image will get blurrier. For this reason, if you plan to edit your photos, you should convert them all to BMP format as soon as they're downloaded. Images in BMP format take up a lot more room, but your computer probably has lots of hard drive space, so that isn't a problem. More importantly, BMP images do not get blurry when you edit and resave them. A good program for converting images from JPG to BMP format is called Irfanviewer; find out more about it and get your own free copy below. If you plan to view your images on your computer, and send them by email, you don't have to use the highest quality settings on your camera. However, once you've taken a lower quality image, it can't be converted to a high quality print. Nevertheless, there are times when you may want a smaller image (to send by email, for example). Unfortunately, reducing a huge image to email size will also distort the image. There's no way around this problem ... we solve it by constantly changing the settings on the camera, using highest quality for ones we know we'll want to print, and lower quality for images we may want to email or post on a website. These smaller sized images won't lose their sharpness when further reduced in size. In any case, buy yourself a high-capacity memory card for your camera so you can take lots of high-quality images before you fill the card and have to download them. Viewing and Converting Your Pictures You have a folder full of pictures, but looking at them all quickly and easily is not a task your computer may be set up to do. The default image viewing program varies from computer to computer, but in general, even with Windows XP, the program your computer uses is probably not very useful. Here's a better alternative. Irfanviewer is a free program for viewing, converting, and simple editing of photos. It has many advantages over the default program you're currently using:
Run Irfanviewer. Go to the top menu labelled 'Options' and choose 'Properties'. Choose the 'Extensions' tab. In the white area of the window, make sure these file types are checked off: BMP GIF JPG/JPEG PCD RAW TGA TIFF WMF Now whenever you double-click an image file, Irfanviewer will run automatically. We use this as our default image viewing program on all the computers at Worsley School, and it works flawlessly. Make sure to increase the compression to 100% when saving images as JPG files ... this reduces the distortion so that it is almost unnoticeable. Viewing Images on your Computer If you'd like to set up your screensaver to display all your photos (Windows XP has this feature), copy the pictures you want to display into a special folder. If your images were taken at the largest image setting, they may be too big for your screen. The size should match the resolution of your monitor, commonly 800x600 or 1024x768. Where you're working right now, (We checked it for you!) Make sure all your pictures are no bigger than this. Irfanviewer can resize them (smaller) for you all at once. Remember: you're resizing BMP images, so they won't go blurry. Also, you're resizing those images you copied into a special folder for viewing on the screen; save the original folder of big images for printing on paper. Sending Images by Email Attachment Like most people, the first thing you'll probably want to do with your pictures is send them to your sister in Moosejaw. Here's how:
If you decide you do want to send many large high-quality images to someone so they can print them, here's what we suggest. They should be JPG format images, unresized. These can be printed at good quality, either on a home printer or at a do-it-yourself kiosk. Burn a whole bunch of these photos to a CD or DVD, buy some inexpensive CD mailing packages, and mail the CD/DVD! Your sister will get a whole disk full of high-quality images that she can print, without the frustration of spending several hours (days???) waiting for them to download. Keeping Your Pictures Safe Hard drives do crash often enough to make it worthwhile considering backing up your stored pictures. The simplest way to do this is to burn them to a CD or DVD. (A DVD is preferable, since CD's are soon going to be obsolete technology). After you copy your pictures to a disk, you shouldn't apply a homemade label, as the glue in the labels will deteriorate the disk over time. Disks also wear out with handling (the information recorded on them is actually on a layer under the top surface; the bottom is just clear plastic), so you should store your backup disk in a safe place and not use it. Using Your Camera Effectively Even the cheapest digital camera ($200-300) will take beautiful photos when set to the highest image quality. Everything is automatic, but there are some things you should know to improve your picture quality. Zooming Your camera probably has a zoom function, to bring distant subjects up close. However, there are two things you need to know:
As described just above, your flash range is limited to about 10-15 feet indoors. If you're taking photos of people on a stage, or pictures at a sporting event, you'll have to move right up close to your subjects to get usable pictures. Unfortunately no inexpensive digital camera is equipped with a flash 'hot shoe' for attaching an external flash unit, so there is no way around this problem. If your camera is set on 'automatic' and you take pictures of things beyond the flash range of your camera (15 ft), the camera will attempt to compensate for the lack of adequate light by doing three things, two of which are not good at all. First, it will open the aperture as wide as possible. This will not have a bad effect on your pictures, but unless you have an expensive camera with a large aperture setting, will not likely be enough to correct the lighting ... your camera will do two more things, both of which are bad: - It will slow the shutter speed, resulting in blurs wherever something or someone in the pictures moves. - It will increase the sensitivity of the receptors (inside the camera) to light, which is the worst thing of all. When it does this, it is increasing the ISO setting (equivalent to ASA in film cameras), and the increased sensitivity may give you a nice bright picture ... but when you view it on your computer or try to print it, you will see that the picture is very grainy and not very attractive at all! Unless you can use an add-on flash with your camera, there is no way to get high quality (printable) photographs if you take pictures beyond the range of your camera's built-in flash. Use Rechargeable Batteries If you take a lot of digital photos, you'll discover right away that your camera goes through expensive batteries at an alarming rate. Buy two sets of rechargeable batteries and a charger, and you'll never regret the extra cost ... they'll pay for themselves over and over. Movies Your camera probably has the capability of taking small digital movies. If you regularly also take full-screen size videos with a video camera, you may wonder why you should bother taking tiny digital movies with your digital camera. Here's what you can do with them. They're tiny in size, but also in the amount of memory they take up. This means they're perfect for sending as email attachments! A 15 second video clip taken with your digital camera probably won't be more that 1 or 2 megabytes in size, which means they will attach comfortably to an email without requiring more than a few minutes to download. If you send one to someone, send two emails; in the first, tell the recipient that you're sending a digital movie; attach it to the second one so they will be expecting a longer than normal download. There are a couple of drawbacks to taking and sending digital movies:
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