What can you do with the Pictures?
Recently, there has been a commercial on TV about people looking for photographs. It seems that everybody has a mess of photos with very little organization. Albums are not kept current, envelopes filled with prints and negatives, boxes filled with pictures and even pictures scattered all over the house left where they were last looked at. A disorganized mess!
Don't think that digital photography will make things easier. There are some serious challenges to be faced before one can have an organized collection of digital photographs. If you're not careful, you can have just as much of a disorganized mess with digital pictures as one could have with traditional photographs.
They're cheap, so...
Digital images are cheap compared to film. Keep your digital camera filled with flash cards or disks and plenty of battery power and you can collect as many as you dare. And this is the problem. Since the images are so cheap, why not take more pictures? This is perhaps the best advantage of digital cameras but it comes at the price of an ever expanding collection of images. They all have to be stored on disks and it is the storage costs that reduces the value of digital photography.
Another argument that you're going to have to face eventually is that of backup. Should you save a backup of each and every picture you take? Should you trust your disks to retrieve your precious pictures now and forever? Are there some you wish to save copies of because they're special images while others are not backed up because they're, well, just ordinary pictures? The problem with backup is that it will double your storage space requirement. But on the other side, do you backup your traditional chemical photos? Aren't there many pictures, extremely valuable and irreplaceable that exist only as a picture? How many great pictures do you have where the negatives are lost? This issue is going to force you to make decisions and you're going to have to live with them no matter what course of action you take. Realize that it is possible to lose an entire box full of backup zip disks as easily as it is to lose a single disk of images that is not backed up. Please give the backup problem some thought!
Consider the costs of various storage media such as zip disks or an extra hard drive. Divide the cost by the amount of storage (in megabytes) and come up with a cost per megabyte. The cost of a hard drive might be the selling price divided by the megabyte capacity. For a zip drive, you have to consider the number of cartridges you may need. If you take the cost of the drive plus one cartridge, you're missing the point. If you want a bit more storage you really wouldn't buy another drive, you buy a stand alone cartridge which is relatively cheap (even cheaper in 10 packs). For a zip system, add the cost of a drive plus a 10 pack of cartridges to get a fair comparison to a hard drive system. Try your calculations again with 20 or even 30 cartridges (you don't have to buy them now but you'll have a better feel for the long term investment).
The lower the cost per megabyte the cheaper the overall storage system. Eventually the disk will be filled and you will need another. This makes hard drives inconvenient because they have to be installed into your computer. They're really not the kind of thing you plug in at a moment's notice. Zip drives are very common and convenient and readily available in packs of ten. Just buy another pack when you run out of disk space.
Consider storage one of the major components of your digital photography system. This then makes owning a computer somewhat important for both storage and manipulating the images. Add to this the investment of storage devices. The computer is an integral part of your digital photography system and its going to be very difficult to take full advantage of this new system without one.
The best of the best
If all you do is take pictures and transfer them to drives, it isn't going to take long before you simply have a drive filled with images. You will be confronted with two choices, expand the storage system by buying more drives or zip cartridges, transfer a pile of them to CDRoms capable of holding 650 MB of images or trim the collection by deleting uninspiring images.
A challenge is to eliminate the less-than-perfect images from your collection leaving you with only the very best photos. This filtering process ensures that your storage is filled only with the nicest and most memorable pictures. Eliminate duplicates, flawed pictures and the uninspiring ones (especially when you can't even remembered what inspired you to take the picture in the first place!). Over time, today's stunning pictures may be just average next to the better ones you will take tomorrow. It may be necessary to cull through your collection from time to time because you will see them differently in perspective to a lot of other nice pictures.
But doing so on a computer can be rather difficult. You can't scatter them on a table to sort them or compare them side by side. On a computer you can view thumbnail versions by opening a number of them, reducing their screen viewing size and placing a number of them on your screen. The problem is that the reduced view doesn't allow you to adequately evaluate each picture.
Developing a concise collection of digital images can be considered one of the objectives of a photographic hobby. Saving only the most precious, important and memorable moments produces a pleasant viewing experience. Each individual picture is of high value and not reduced by the sheer quantity of additional questionable images that one would have to suffer through before getting to an occasional or rare gem. Your best of the best collection should be impressive and a joy for anyone to look at.
The best solution is to have a special "best of the best" disk that contains copies of your very best pictures. Copies? Yes, computer files can be copied very easily creating a duplicate picture in a couple of seconds at no cost except for additional storage. You should use this trick to your advantage but watch out that you aren't keeping all sorts of copies of each and every picture, scattered all over the place. This can also be a solution to the backup problem where you backup only the best of your images.
The Printed Album
Photo albums were the natural solution to piles of prints. Certainly preferable and more organized than shoe boxes. But albums were the logical choice for the media. After all, you were dealing with pieces of paper, the natural output of the process. Therefore, photo albums were a solution to the storage problem for prints of a certain size.
In order to assemble an album of digital photos, they must first be printed onto paper similar to chemical photographs. This additional processing involves a lot of technology to make sure the print is representative of the actual file. Adjustments must be made to ensure that the densities of the file fit within the range of limitations of the printing process. It could be quite a trick to do and you absolutely need a computer and software such as Photoshop to do the job right. Your output may be to dye sublimation printers or inkjet printers. The dye-sub printers are much better, often resembling chemical photographs (it is difficult to detect the difference). The ink jet printers are inferior to both dye-sub and photos because you see the image elements (tiny dots of ink that is squirted on the sheet to create the image) if you look closely.
The final insult is that the cost of making prints from digital files. At this time there is no comparison between the prices. Conventional film and photo paper is very, very cheap. It is a wonder why photo paper which requires careful coating with emulsions, an exposure, precise processing with chemicals and delivery can be cheaper than buying similar paper for your inkjet or dye-sub and, of course, the cost of the ink or ribbon cartridges. The only consolation is that you only print those photos you really think are special for your album. As one of the few advantages, digital files should be adjusted in programs like Photoshop before they are printed. As you skills improve, you can even edit and retouch the pictures will little effort and no cost except for a bit more electricity to run your computer for a few minutes. This advantage further ensures that your digitally produced photographs will be as perfect as possible, however, you must either own a computer or suffer the expense of buying one (as well as the software!) before you can take advantage of these capabilities. It isn't necessary to print all the pictures, nor do you have to discard the files you choose not to print. It is possible to save all the files and only print them when and if you need a print for whatever reason.
The last issue is that of your own personal objectives for your digital photographic pursuits. If your objectives are to collect them and only print out the best, even after considerable Photoshop retouching and adjusting, digital prints can allow you to produce a great album. But if your intentions are to print all your digital images and place them in albums, you really should consider staying with the older chemical process. The model of digital to dyesub prints is simply too expensive to compare with chemical film. Only if you wish to be selective in your printing and wish to take advantage of the power of Photoshop should you consider digital over conventional. Trying to replace the local drug store's photo finishing with your own dyesub printer is not practical or cost efficient.
Zip, zip, zip
The natural storage medial for digital prints should be one of the traditional computer storage devices used for regular computer work. Floppy drives, hard drives, CD roms or even zip drives become the computer equivalent of the traditional photo album. A 650MB CD rom can hold many pictures (depending on the size and resolution). Zip disks are convenient for organizing your ever expanding collection of images. Floppy disks are not very convenient because they don't hold many pictures. Some high resolution pictures won't even fit on a single floppy!
Unlike photographs, where you can identify them simply by looking at them, each digital file must have its own unique filename. You will have to develop a file name system that you can remember. File names like "Image 1" or "Picture A" will become useless very quickly. Although you can have pictures of the same name, no two can exist in the same place on the same storage device at the same time. One will automatically overwrite (replace) the other erasing it so completely that there will be no evidence of its existence. Computer files are like that! To avoid accidentally moving files and overwriting, strive to develop a system of unique filenames. It isn't easy, but it is necessary.
This is part of the file management problem that digital photos will quickly generate. Since they're practically free to produce they can be a nightmare to keep organized. Without the cost of materials or processing they keep accumulating. We may easily be talking of thousands!
Accessing the collection is a must. We should not have disks filled with images, all with cryptic names that we will forget the significance within days. There needs to be organizational systems for categories or topics in our collection. One folder or disk just for the Florida vacation. Maybe one disk just for covered bridges. Another disk just for sunsets and another for flowers. Whatever the categories, there must be some kind of organization or else access will be almost impossible.
But all images are the record of a moment in time that we thought enough of to capture on film in the first place. Will we be able to let go of those precious moments and discard an inferior image? In the process of saving only the best can we discard the not-so-best? No doubt there is some sentimentality attached to each and every image and, unless we want to spend a fortune on zip disks, we're going to have to learn to let go.
The computer slide show
Digital pictures are naturally digital and show up quite nicely on a computer monitor. Where photo albums are natural for photographs, it is natural that a viewing system is developed around the computer. Computer slide shows can be a rewarding end to this fascinating hobby that you can easily share with others.Develop computerized slide shows where the pictures are viewed on a computer monitor. It is even possible to transfer the output of the computer to a large TV monitor or projector so that many people can view the pictures. It may be necessary to resize the pictures to format them to the screen size. Programs such as PowerPoint can be used to assemble slide shows. Other slide show utilities should also available. Finished shows can be stored on zip disks and run at any time. Since images can be easily copied, appropriate images can be included in any show even if the same picture is included in other shows.
With presentation hardware, it may be possible to record the show onto video tape and distribute them to friends and family whenever the opportunity arises.
Attach the digital picture to your e-mail and anyone you send the picture to can enjoy it. They can save it, print it, view it, show it to others. Digital pictures are a natural addition to e-mail messages. You can show someone what you're talking about. Best of all, the original file is retained on your computer as only a copy of the picture is send out.
Pictures as graphics are generally huge and will take awhile to transfer over the web. Besides, they will take up a lot of storage space in your friend's electronic mailbox. When e-mailing pictures you are transferring a storage problem along with the picture itself. Small pictures that can be easily transferred and viewed are preferable. You may have to do some work adjusting the image size to reduce a large digital picture to a more friendly size. The process is not difficult, but on your computer the results will be an additional file of the same image. Now you have two files to keep track of! Don't send the wrong file!
E-mail is also a very good way of transferring pictures from one location to another. Consider e-mailing your photo to the local newspaper so that they may print your newsworthy photo. You don't have to worry about them returning your picture because you still retain the original; they only get a copy. If they have no use for the picture they simply delete it. Maybe they'll be nice enough to e-mail a rejection note which would be better than the old days where they would trash your picture because it is too costly and time consuming to return it (or a rejection letter) to you.
For all the reasons of using cameras to take pictures, you can easily use e-mail to communicate them with others. Photos can add a new dimension to your correspondence. Furthermore, with digital cameras, the process is very quick and very cheap. In minutes a picture, from camera to web can be on its way to anyplace in the world!
Your web page
Digital photography and the web can be an interesting combination. The output of digital cameras can be easily transferred to a web page or even web site. You can place the pictures directly on the pages or you can have links to them so they open in their own windows. You can have thumbnail images that let the viewer know which picture they will take a close look at. The advantage to this is that a web page with a bunch of large pictures would take a very long time to download. Your viewer is forced to sit and wait while a lot of images load, images they may not even be interested in seeing.
Developing a photography slide show for your web site is also practical. In this way the viewer clicks on a "next" button to load the next picture in the series. For the ultimate, you can use JavaScript and write routines to randomly display images or allow the viewer to search for pictures from a large on-line collection. The challenges and possibilities are almost endless.
ConclusionOnce you buy and use a digital camera and related components, you will quickly realize that digital pictures are cheap. Having ideas of what to do with them is an essential part of the hobby. Better still, what you plan to do with the pictures is actually something you should decide on before you even get involved in digital photography. Be your objectives commercial, personal or if you just simply want to learn about this exciting new technology, have plans for displaying your creative output.
