Curious about digital photography?

Though digital photography has come a long way, beginning photographers must still maintain control of the shots they intend to take. For example, focusing and clarity can be sensed automatically by most digital cameras, but that doesn't necessarily make the picture a good one. Therefore, choosing the right camera, one which allows you to control intensity, contrast and lighting, is not a choice to make sparingly. Most often, people review cameras and pick their own personal favorite, and while the advice may be helpful to others, it is not necessarily for everyone. First, your needs must determine the type of camera you will buy. Do you prefer to have a smaller camera that can be carried around in your pocket, or would you rather a full-size camera which is carried in a bag? The choice is up to the buyer, and should be thought about carefully before making a decision.

Some of today's film purists look at digital photography as an unnecessary evil. Is it an unfair advantage that the digital photographer can take a photograph, upload it to their computer, do a little image editing, then have a finished product ready to present to a client (or a personal framed print, suitable for hanging), all in a matter of a couple of hours or less? This is called capitalizing on available technology, and if you're still one of those that haven't embraced the tools that are available today, then shame on you! In no way does this mean that film photographers should ditch their 35mm cameras and darkrooms. Much of the work performed in the darkroom is similar to what we do today in Photoshop. We cloned in trees that didn't exist, removed power lines that distracted from the shot, enhanced colors that were bland, and if we couldn't do it in the darkroom it was sent to the lab's airbrush specialist. This person who was definitely an artist and highly skilled in what she did, also took ordinary images and made them extraordinary. One of her specialties was taking old photos that had been bent, folded, and manipulated, and airbrushed everything back to perfection. Digital photography and image processing is not a whole lot different from how things were done 25 years ago.

White balance (WB) is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. Proper camera white balance has to take into account the "color temperature" of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light. Our eyes are very good at judging what is white under different light sources, however digital cameras often have great difficulty with auto white balance (AWB). An incorrect WB can create unsightly blue, orange, or even green color casts, which are unrealistic and particularly damaging to portraits. Performing WB in traditional film photography requires attaching a different cast-removing filter for each lighting condition, whereas with digital this is no longer required. Understanding digital white balance can help you avoid color casts created by your camera's AWB, thereby improving your photos under a wider range of lighting conditions. A digital camera's auto white balance is often more effective when the photo contains at least one white or bright colorless element. Of course, do not try to change your composition to include a colorless object, but just be aware that its absence may cause problems with the auto white balance.

Action photographs are quite popular, though they are difficult to take properly. Speed is essential to taking clear pictures for indoor sports and activities. The shutter speed is crucial, for if it is too slow you will lose the picture, as the movement will have continued past the shot you wanted. The results can be erratic, so the highest quality won't be assured. Make sure when taking pictures of indoor sports that your camera is on a setting with a fast shutter, such as rapid fire mode.

In computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. The name JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that created the standard. JPEG itself specifies how an image is compressed into a stream of bytes and decompressed back into an image and the file format used to contain that stream. The compression method is usually lossy compression, meaning that some visual quality is lost in the process, although there are variations on the standard baseline JPEG which are lossless. There is also an interlaced "progressive" format, in which data is compressed in multiple passes of progressively higher detail. This is ideal for large images that will be displayed whilst downloading over a slow connection, allowing a reasonable preview before all the data has been retrieved. However, progressive JPEGs are not as widely supported.

We've all see photographs where the people in the picture have spooky red eyes. These are photos taken at night with a flash. Where do the red eyes come from? The red color comes from light that reflects off of the retinas in our eyes. If you shine a flashlight in a person's eyes at night, you don't see any sort of reflection. The flash on a camera is bright enough, however, to cause a reflection off of the retina -- what you see is the red color from the blood vessels nourishing the eye. Many cameras have a "red eye reduction" feature. In these cameras, the flash goes off twice -- once right before the picture is taken, and then again to actually take the picture. The first flash causes people's pupils to contract, reducing "red eye" significantly. Another trick is to turn on all the lights in the room, which also contracts the pupil.

"Picture-perfect" is a term almost always associated with photography, which makes photographers think that every photograph must be absolutely perfect. This is simply not true. Most often some of the best pictures are not perfect, because perfect can be predictable. However, in order to get those perfect pictures, any photographer, whether experienced or a beginner, must be patient and persistent. Eventually, taking perfect pictures will simply become a habit.

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