digital camera

I'v always had a Pentax SLR from art college days, and its a great camera
but being able to put the photos straight onto the computer, seconds
after taking the shot and then playing, manipulating and altering
is so much fun. You are in complete control of your images. Resize them,
crop them and add filters to them, features that only proffessional
photographers with expensive equipement, had access to.
On holidays, insted of buying a few rolls of expensive film, I now buy
a box of floppy disks. 1 floppy will take about 35 low res pics
or 18 high resolution pics, although I find low res good enough
for most photos. It gives me such freedom to snap at whatever
my heart desires, without fear of wasting anything. If you dont
like what you've done (you can play back any pic you took) just
delete it. Subjects you would'nt normally consider taking, angles
zooming in, unusual viewpoints, abstracts- suddenly your a
proffessional photographeron a mission with an expert eye open
for that exceptional shot
Well thats how it gets me- and sometimes you get a good picture!
My camera a Sony Mavica MVC FD7x10 still, was quite expensive
but I got a good deal in a shop in Hollywood 2 years ago, almost half the price
it was in UK. I think they're much cheaper now.
It has some cool features:- picture effects Pastel/it can turn a pic
into an impressionistic work of art. Negative/ some interesting images,
havent used this one much yet. But the ones I really like
and got carried away with, on my Spanish holiday this year are these two.
Sepia/takes old nostalgic pictures instantly. Black and white/go for that
classic arty look.
Of course there is the various programmes for different lighting and
views ie distant/action/cloudy etc to make the best of your shot as easy as pie.
It zooms in real close and I use it for pics of artwork/embroidery
stiches have good definition for an example. It always seems to be in focus
I used to have a lot of troubel with camera shake which ruined many
an important picture.
Then when the disk is full load it in the computer and transfer the pics to a file, delete them off the floppy and you can reuse it.
You can get cheap software progs like Photosuite which will allow you to make and organise albums, thes can be stored on Zips, or write to CD's if you get into it. Takes up a lot less room then loads of packets of photos.
The low res pics are ideal for sending in e-mails and uploading to the web.
Im not trying to sell you one, I just hope this explains how it helps me.
Will try and get other write ups of other digital cameras, as so many
work in other ways, some use a memory stick, others use a card but down loading images from what ever memory device is usally quite easy. The humble floppy is so easy and if you run out you can buy them anywhere!

Alongside the camera its useful to have a photo editing software programme
such as Paint Shop Pro. Many PC users have this as its reasonably priced
compared with more professional packages and can do the same kind
of editing and filter techniques.
I always take my photos into PSP to resize them (the digital camera pics always come
up very big) and perhaps rotate them. Then I might adjust the brightness contrast, then maybe play about with some filters, like adding some noise. If you copy and paste into a new file, that has been coloured, it becomes a layer, which you can adjust with differnt effects, such as dissolve (making the pic dissolve into the background) or difference (which can drastically change the colours depending on what you use, fiddling about with the transparency levels can give you what your looking for)
Practice makes perfect, and its good fun experimenting.
All the photos are compressed to download quickly and may appear broken up, so they dont give an accurate apperance of the quality of the digital photos.

Pop up boxes give a brief description of alterations to the photos if you're interested
Gillian Allen Jan 2001