My Photo Printer.net - Tips for Taking Good Digital Photos for your Photo Printer

Good photos lead to good results from your photo printer.

Getting good results from your digital photos is not difficult, but it will take some experimentation. A lot of the photo tips in this article apply to both 'traditional' analog film and digital photography. However, since this site is better suited to digital photography, expect the focus of this article to be on the weird and wacky ways of digital photo.

Set your camera to it's highest resolution and quality when taking photos

Far, far, too many people take photos with their digital cameras at less than the highest quality and resolution available. It doesn't matter how many mega pixels your digital camera has, in almost all circumstances, you should use the highest settings that your camera provides. Consult your manual on how to do this, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Using the highest resolution that your camera offers will consume more storage space on your flash card; however, memory for digital cameras is relatively cheap. For example, you can get 128MB and 256MB cards for about $60 USD and $70 USD respectively from places like tigerdirect.com (they have a Canadian site too). For a 3 megapixel camera set to it's highest resolution and JPG quality (raw images, if your camera provides them, are significantly larger), that amounts to about 100 and 200 photos at the highest quality and resolution - multiply that by 1.5 for a 2 megapixel camera. You will also require more hard disk space and other permanent storage space for your photos, but it is cheap too. When you are running low on hard drive space, just move your photos onto on a CD (or two, a backup is a VERY good idea - CDR life is quite suspect at this time!) and you're all set to take more photos.

Remember, flash cards are a one time cost and CD's are dirt cheap, but you only get one chance to take your photos and you want those memories preserved for a lifetime. Who knows what you'll want to do with your photos in the future? Make a collage? Crop out your pet? Blow it up to a poster size? The better digital files you keep, the more flexibility you'll have in the future for editing, enlarging, and enjoying them.

With digital cameras, take lots of photos and keep the best ones

Digital is a totally different type of photography. With a digital camera, you can see your results instantly, so take advantage of it! You don't need to wait for people to pose for a photo. Often the best photos are taken of the spontaneous moments in life. Years ago photographers had tools to help people stay still for the long exposures. It wasn't too many years ago that many people often wanted to pose for photos, because developing 'bad' photos costs money and wastes film. But with digital you only keep and print what you want. So snap away. If you've followed my advice above, to get a large memory card, you won't need to worry about memory space until you get home!

Use your flash selectively when taking snapshots

Imaging you are admiring a nice grove of trees, and you decide to take a photo of it. What makes it serene? Is it the trees? Other plants? The sky? Often it's the subtle play of the shadows cast by the trees and their leaves. Now what happens if your flash goes off when you take your photo? All of a sudden you've added another light source to your image. If the sun light passing though the trees was casting idyllic shadows on the ground, they may disappear from the light cast from your flash. Congratulations, you now have a pretty picture of some trees and grass. You've probably lost a lot of depth that the shadows provided, and the result is a cute but not special picture.

If you are outside, you can usually get away without using your flash. Again, it's up to you to look up in your manual on how to achieve this. On many cameras you can set the sensitivity of your captured image, on my Toshiba it's the "iso" setting. The ISO scale is the same one used to grade regular film - so, you may have considered "100 ISO" for outdoor use, "400 ISO" for indoor use, and "200 ISO" for a reasonable film for both indoor and outdoor. The higher the ISO equivalent, the more sensitive to light, the better you are able to take photos in lower light conditions - the downside to higher ISO settings is that you get more grainy photos in film, and more noise in digital work.

Another trick to reducing the need for flash is to get a tripod. They help you keep the camera still so that the shutter can stay open for a longer period of time. Without a tripod, the slight movement in your hands will quickly blur any photo where the exposure time gets up too long. Tripods have a pretty standard connector, you can probably find one used on ebay or get a cheap off-brand locally or something.

Be careful with your digital zoom!

Pretty much all digicams have a digital zoom feature. Be warned that digital zoom is not the same as optical zoom. An optical zoom is just like the zoom lenses on traditional cameras - it's sort of a specialized magnifying glass. Digital zoom on the other hand works by using only the centre portion of the image capturing component (i.e. the CCD) of your camera. It's very similar in concept to cropping an image in a graphics program.

There are pros and cons to digital zoom. One pro is that your photo is "cropped" as desired. So, if you don't want to mess around in a photo editing program, you don't need to. Another positive is that your camera will be able to perform its cropping and resizing on the raw image information. The raw image will always be a better source for cropping than the jpg files that most cameras upload to the PC. Thus by letting the camera do the cropping, the final output is theoretically better. The biggest con against using digital zoom is that you are not using the entire image capturing ability of your camera. Instead of digital zoom, you could take a photo from "farther" away and zoom (i.e. crop) the image in software. You will get nearly the same image quality, and still have the option of using the rest of the image if you happen to have changed your mind.

Edit your photos before printing!

You don't need a black room to play around with digital art! Just grab some software and play around. Remember rule #1, never loose resolution/quality! It's only storage space. A CD can hold hundreds of photos, and costs less than a $1. We'll have an article on some photo editing software soon. We also have some links to some graphical software tools in our links area.

Comments? Questions? Please post them in our forums.

Leonard

Published on: 2003-07-24 (160057 reads)

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