Picture Perfect with Digital Photography

Remember the days of film camera's when you thought you had taken that brilliant shot only to discover after having the photographs developed that either there was a huge thumb in the way, a head had been chopped off or it was blurred.

This shouldn't happen now with digital camera's because you can delete the bad shots and keep the good ones. Even if you did make a mistake, I can bet that you are not going to admit it, are you.

The above picture can be quickly corrected in either Picasa or Photoshop but it does make me laugh.

Buying a new camera is a tricky business these days because there are so many different makes and models to choose from.
Personally I would steer clear of the makes that you have never heard of and the one's that seem so ridiculously cheap that surely it cannot be a digital camera.
Stick to the main makes;
Nikon
Kodak
Canon
Fuji
Panasonic
Olympus
Minolta
Pentax
Polaroid
Leica
I expect there are a few other good makes but these will do.
Don't believe all the hype about having a camera with an impressive amount of megapixels because unless the lens fitted to the camera is a good make then you are not going to see any benefits.
If you go into a shop and the salesman goes on about the benefits of Digital Zoom he hasn't got a clue and knows absolutely nothing about digital camera's.
Digital Zoom enlarges part of the image which simulates optical zoom but the camera crops part of the image before enlarging it back to size, the result is not a very good picture at all.
Digital Zoom is a way of editing the picture within the camera which it does rather poorly.
The editing of the picture is best left to Computer Software.
Optical Zoom is the only one to consider when choosing a camera.
Memory Cards are an important addition if you like taking several pictures because normally Digital Camera's only have an inbuilt memory of 16Mb or less.
Fuji & Olympus Camera's use XD cards which are expensive to buy plus tricky to install because of their small size.
SD and Compact Flash Memory Cards are a better because of;
1. Their size.
2. Memory size.
3. Price.

Most new computers have inbuilt card readers but if yours doesn't then it is a sensible option to purchase one.
It isn't necessary to buy one that has to be installed into the PC itself because the easiest method is to buy one that connects via the USB connection.
The reason for buying a USB card reader is this is so much easier than trying to connect the camera to the computer because most software that comes with your camera is complicated to use.
My card reader is identical to the one in the picture and does the job perfectly.
They are inexpensive and very easy to use, just take the card out of the camera and insert into the card reader, connect into a USB port and save to a folder.
The images will automatically be saved as jpegs.

If you want to play around with your images or even crop them then what you will require is Editing Software.
You can either pay for software or use Free software, this all depends on how far you want to take this and what your skill level is.
The best option is to start with the Free Software first and I recommend PICASA from Google.
It is very easy to use and provides an easy to follow guide.
You can let the software decide or you have a go yourself at editing.

If you are after a more professional software then there is only one decent Editing Software and that is Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

This a fantastic piece of software that allows you to be far more creative.