BestAdvice Photography

You've been using point-and-shoot digital cameras for years, perhaps with mixed results, and now you're starting to wonder if it's time to invest in a digital single lens reflex camera. The type of camera that's right for you depends on how serious you are about capturing high-quality images.

Your compact point-and-shoot is probably all you need if you're taking mostly family shots: your mom blowing out candles on her 60th birthday, your daughter pulling to her feet for the first time, your son hitting a home run on the Little League field. But if you're the kind of photographer -- amateur or professional -- who is literally sprawled on the floor of the basketball court, determined to get the perfect action shot, you are probably ready to make the switch to a digital SLR camera.

Digital SLR cameras typically cost much more than regular digital cameras -- in some cases several hundred dollars more -- but many photographers feel that the high-quality images they produce are worth the extra expense. DSLRs, which use a mechanical mirror system and pentaprism to direct light from the lens to an optical viewfinder on the back of the camera, have multiple image sensors and excellent light sensitivity. Plus they have a wide variety of settings and can be souped up with add-on lenses and flash units -- all of which allows you greater flexibility and control in getting just the right shot. Read more

Hurricane Gustav chased an estimated two million people from their homes. Fires in Southern California and Yosemite Park areas destroyed thousands of acres and burnt hundreds of homes. Floods in the Midwest swept into homes despite residents’ best efforts. Every day natural disasters take their financial and emotional toll.

In Katrina’s Path
Donna Wilsker, a long-time scrapbooker and resident of Beaumont, TX, was partially prepared when Katrina sent her and her husband, Ira, to their daughter’s home in Houston two years ago. They fled the area with as many of their valuables as they could fit in their Honda Accord, including her scrapbooks and a stack of 20 CD’s, containing the family’s complete digital photo collection. Read more

In the last article, I explained what online photo sites can do for you, and why you might want to use them. It's time now to get down to business: choosing the one that's right for you. What specific features should you look for? And which are most appropriate for your personal level of technical sophistication?

By and large, every one of the online photo sites accomplishes the same goal. Each lets you upload a collection of digital photos, and they make it easy (or at least it's supposed to be easy) to share them with other people. They also let you (that is, encourage you) to order prints of your photographs, and perhaps other customized items.

But, naturally, few sites stop there. Each site has its own unique features to make you choose that company instead of one of the other dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- available. Sometimes, the "extras" are the special attention they invest in making the process easy for computing novices, or maybe they're fancy tools to add bubbles or comic-book style captions to the photos. Other times, the site has unique capabilities to link your photos to other sites and to help you participate in a public community. Read more

Questions just keep rolling in at Verbatim’s user information site www.photostorageguide.com. General questions from people on how to gather, save, protect their family moments/memories photos and videos.

Here are answers to some of the latest questions (and answers) on archiving photos:

Q. Why are CDs and DVDs the best way to archive?

A. Since it is estimated that one out of seven computer hard drives "crash" within the first year, it could be dangerous to rely on storing irreplaceable photos on a hard drive alone. Optical discs (CD, DVD) are a very economical and reliable way to archive photos. For added security, write-once CD-Rs and DVD-Rs should be used and extra copies should be made that can be stored at another location. Users can add to the disc but cannot alter the content stored on the discs. The portability of CDs and DVDs also makes them easy to take with you in the event of an environmental disaster. Read more

Sarah is typical of most young women today, balancing her marketing career, running a household, and enjoying her 10-month old son, Grayson. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to complete daily chores, let alone additional projects. However, after Jack, her husband, accidentally erased the memory card with the family’s photos of their recent trip to visit Sarah’s parents in Maine, she decided to take on the task of organizing and protecting the family’s memories.

“It wasn’t as though we had lost our entire collection, but those photos were irreplaceable,” Sarah said. “Luckily, we were able to find a software program that recovered most of the pictures from the card. Otherwise, Jack may still be sleeping on the couch.” Read more

Questions just keep rolling in at Verbatim’s user information site www.photostorageguide.com. General questions from people on how to gather, save, protect their family moments/memories photos and videos.

Here are answers to some of the latest:

Q. I want to organize and archive my photos. Where do I start?

A. Start by giving your photos descriptive file names. This will speed the search process. If you name the files as you download them, you won't have to go back and view each one to name it. You can also use the tag capability offered with most photo applications to attach a keyword (or many keywords) to a photo file. You can also organize your photos by creating folders for various themes, i.e., family vacations, reunions, and various family members.

If the task seems overwhelming, start with the most recent photos and work your way back through the older ones. Read more

Since Verbatim launched their user information site www.photostorageguide.com, they have received a number of questions from people on how to gather, save, and protect family memories, photos and videos.

The following are some of the most commonly asked questions they received:

Q - What are the best practices for caring for images stored on my camera's memory card?

A - It is best to download all your photos from the card onto the computer. Then delete the ones you don't want. If you continuously delete them directly from your camera, you could accidentally delete a desired photo, or risk corrupting the files. One corrupted image file can cause many other images files to be lost. Keep a spare memory card on hand if you anticipate running out of storage space on your current card, to avoid having to delete photos just to make room for new images.

One of the most common causes of corrupt files is turning the camera off or removing the memory card before the camera buffer has completely transferred your files to the memory card. Read more

YouTube has risen to prominence in recent years as the Internet's choice for getting video from point 'a' to point 'broadcast' - attracting Google's attention and purchasing dollars with its one hundred million video views per day. While there are other options to get your video online, YouTube remains, by far, the most wildly popular. Its massive amount of content attests to its ease-of-use. However, these tips and tricks will help you out with just about any video broadcast site out there - from iFilm to GodTube - since they focus on the basic practices of capturing, editing and converting video into a format the Internet can understand.

If you would rather watch than read, here is a short video tutorial showing you the steps involved. 

Getting started
To get your video up on YouTube, you need four things:

• The footage itself
  
• A computer with a high-speed Internet connection
  
• Basic video editing software
• A YouTube account.
  

I bought my first digital camera soon after my son was born. I took so many photos that I turned the picture counter back to 0000. Yes, my bundle of joy was the subject of more than 10,000 shots—and why not? That's the beauty of digital: click away, delete the rejects and develop the photos you want. With the vast range of digital cameras on the market, I'm clearly not their sole fan. But like all products digital, the choices are both overwhelming and confusing. Following are the eight most common mistakes made by first-time buyers, plus which digital-camera features really matter.

Megapixel mix-up
Digital photos are made up of tiny dots called pixels. Simply put, the more pixels your camera has, the sharper your pictures will be. But don’t let the higher numbers mislead you. What's considered the minimum nowadays -- 3 megapixels -- will result in crystal-clear photos that can be developed as large as 20 in. x 30 in. without degradation in quality. In fact, a 3-megapixel camera is more than enough if you want to showcase your photos in a traditional photo album and e-mail them to friends and family. So why consider a camera that boasts as much as 7 megapixels? Anytime you crop a photo to hone in on your subject, you are actually reducing the number of pixels and, therefore, losing some picture quality. If you start with more megapixels at the outset, the diminishment is less likely to make a difference in the quality of your photos. Read more

You've just returned from vacation with a digital camera stuffed full of photos. And, wow! Some of these look pretty good! But your family is spread all over the country. To show Aunt Molly what the new Busch Stadium looks like, you'll have to send the pictures electronically.

But wait -- don't reach for your e-mail program. Even if you have a high-speed connection that makes downloading big files easy, you can't assume that all of your friends and relatives have equally fast access. Besides, e-mail is a good way to send files, but it isn't a very good way to share them. For example, an e-mail message doesn't have any way for you to arrange the photos; they're displayed haphazardly. And it's hard to include a caption, such as, "Can you believe this baby is so bald?"

Many better options are available, which are just as easy to use -- and they're free!
Several online services let you copy your digital photos to the Internet, and then display the photos to the world … or to only a few of your chosen friends. Instead of dumping megabytes of images into someone's inbox, you send your sister an e-mail message with a link to your "Trip to the Metropolitan Museum" photo album, and she can look at the photos at her leisure. Most of the sites help you send out that e-mail message, too, to make it even simpler. Read more