Category Archives: Photography

Digital camera sales clicking

U.S. sales of digital cameras jumped more than 50 percent in 2002.

Practically all the camera shops in Cork now sell digital cameras. One shop sells only digital, and others have a wide range. After printing a few photos using a cheap inkjet printer and photopaper I’m certain that digital’s time has come. Pity about the price of printer consumables though.

Afternoon Robin.

photoSIG – Two teens running from Tank

These two teens were running from the approaching tank (seen in the background). They had been throwing stones with friends as the tanks entered the city. The group had dispersed when tear-gas and shots were fired. You can see the excitement in their eyes.

Retouching Amatuer Portraits – short but excellent article!

How good is digital [photography]?

Compared to the best 35mm cameras? I just read through a very thorough analysis that finally answers the question for me.

I haven’t read the linked article, but there’s plenty of comments. This is akin to the vi vs emacs debate in the Unix world!

Mark, if you’re thinking of buying a digital camera, make sure to read the dissmissive reviews as well as the usual praising reviews.
My advice? As a beginner you probably won’t want a camera with fully-manual controls. There are a few budget cameras out there at the sub EUR500 market with manual controls but you sacrifice other functionality. My camera, a Fujifilm 2800z, is well behind the curve of camera technology (but then camera tech in Ireland seems to be that way..) but it’s a superb camera.
I like having a good zoom camera now. It makes it much easier to compose and frame a subject. The 6x zoom of the 2800z is the exception, most other cameras around the same price have a 3x zoom.
As I’ve said before here, the movie recording feature of my camera didn’t appeal to me first, but now I’m *very* glad I have it. You’re not going to do anything artistic or beautiful with the crap resolution available in movie mode, but you are preserving a memory of an event or subject.
How many Mega Pixels? I’m fairly happy with a 2MP camera. I’d love a higher res one, but then it becomes a bit more complicated. Somehow I think we won’t have to worry about that for a few years, given the cost of those cameras! Oh yeah, higher MP count means higher image size (if you want to take advantage of the better CCD of course!) and that means more storage space. Since September I’ve copied over 2GB of photos from my camera. 2GB isn’t too bad, but by next year will I have 10GB of images? Backing up that amount of data is going to get interesting as all I have is a CDR. I need a DVD writer..
Anyway, go for a higher MP camera if you can, but if another camera with lower MP has more features then go for that. Anything above or equal to 2MP will look good printed out at standard photographic size, or so I’m told.
Might be worth looking at Froogle too.

Will Raleigh praises iPhoto 2..

The retouch button in iPhoto 2 is scary good… This thing seems to have more intelligence than me and my 13+ years of professional experience. I am well and truly floored.