This learning activity involved quite a lot of research. It was quite helpful in developing an overall picture of how photography works, there is far more to it than just point and click like you do with your smart phone. Later on it should be fun to explore how a fully manual camera works.
- Why go digital? What are some of the reasons to use digital photographs?
Two major reasons for choosing a digital camera over film are the cheaper ongoing costs and the convenience of seeing your photos before they are printed.
2. What is a digital photograph?
What are Pixels?
What are Pixels?
A pixel is an individual dot on a screen that is made up of many dots. Screens, like those on a digital camera, are made up of thousands of little dots.
3. What is the relationship between the number of pixels and quality of the image?
The greater the number of pixels, the better the picture.
The three steps of digital photography
Explain the three basic steps involved in creating and using digital photographs and briefly give examples.
Explain the three basic steps involved in creating and using digital photographs and briefly give examples.
4. Step 1. Inputting photographs
ISO stands for International Standards Organisation and is the digital equivalent to the measure of how sensitive camera film is to light. In a typical situation 100 ISO is a good amount. Aperture adjustments affect how much light is allowed into a shot. Allowing more light into a shot causes more of the shot to be in focus, allowing less light in means that only the foreground of the shot will be in focus. The shutter of a camera is a mechanism that stops light touching the light sensor. A shutter speed increase allows you to capture moving objects as though they were not moving, and a shutter speed decrease causes the subject of a photo to blur.
5. Step 2. Processing photographs
Processing a digital photo requires the use of some software to adjust certain things like brightness and contrast as well as crop parts of an image that aren’t needed. Digital photo processing can be done with software built into a camera or on especially designed programs like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.
6. Step 3. Outputting photographs
Digital photos can be used in various ways, including in a printed format and on digital devises like phones and computers. Photos can be transferred to a computer by plugging the camera’s memory card into the computer, using a USB cable, or in some cases wireless transfer. In order to print digital photos, the files can transferred to USB storage and taken to a camera shop.
7. How a digital camera works. How similar is a digital camera to a traditional camera?
A digital camera uses a light sensor to capture images whereas film cameras use photosensitive film. Digital photography is different to film in quality; film has a better picture in many situations, especially when there are many shadows and significant contrast between light and dark. A digital camera allows users to take as many photos as they like, but a film camera offers higher quality for a lower price than high quality digital.
8. What is hand-colouring?
What is the history behind hand colouring? Why was it used?
What is the history behind hand colouring? Why was it used?
The technique of hand colouring photographs was used before invention of colour photography. The first record of hand coloured photography is in 1939 and it was done by a Swiss man named Johan Baptist Isenring. The Japanese took to hand coloured photography as a kind of art form and it had mainstream appeal in Japan from 1860-1899. Hand coloured photography was popular right through to the 1950s when coloured film became available.
Types of digital cameras
9. Point and shoot cameras
Also called a compact camera, point-and-shoot cameras make the process of taking pictures entirely automated. Point and shoot cameras are designed for people who happy snaps and aren’t interested in learning the finger points of photography.
Price point: between $50 and $300
10. Prosumer cameras
Prosumer cameras have far more features than a compact camera and allow the user full manual control over the photography process. Still compact like a point and shoot/compact camera, prosumer cameras are part way between amateur and professional, allowing quality minded photographers an option when they can’t carry around a full DSLR. These cameras can be of sufficient quality for print publication photos.
Price point: $350-$1000
11. Professional Cameras
Professional level DSLR cameras produce higher quality images and allow changing lenses so that the user can choose the optimal lens for the situation. DSLR’s have optical view finders that allow you to see the object you are photographing with a mirror rather than through a digitally reproduced image. The ability to control all camera functions manually is of use to professional photographers using DSLRs.
Price point: $400-$7000
12. Speciality cameras
These sorts of specialty cameras have recently come on the market. Describe some of their advantages and special features.
Waterproof, infrared, and panoramic cameras are types of camera used for special situations.
Waterproof cameras can, as their name suggests, take pictures under water. Taking pictures underwater is good for divers who like to photograph things coral reefs.
An infrared, or thermographic, camera takes pictures of heat which can be useful at night time. In a security situations it might be more practical to use an infrared camera than to shine a light on something as doing so might disturb the subject or let them know you can see them.
Panoramic cameras are designed to take in a wider picture than regular cameras. Landscape photographers may choose a panoramic camera in order to improve the quality of their shots.
Image storage
13. Describe how digital cameras store their images.
13. Describe how digital cameras store their images.
Digital cameras store images on small cards that you can remove a place in your computer. Cameras can also have a small amount of built in memory to save photos to.
14. Name some of the popular makes of Flash cards on the market. What are their features?
The three main kinds of flash cards for a camera are: SD, SDHC, SDXC. Each flash card can be purchased at different speeds of upload. Purchasing a faster card is good if you are taking data intensive shots using raw image files. SD stands for “secure digital” and is a good card for point and shoot style photography. SDHC stands for “secure digital high capacity” and can have loading speeds of 25 MB/s, twice as fast as SD. SCXC cards are up to four times as fast as SDHC cards and hence are used by more serious photographers.
Downloading images, what to plug in
15. Explain the process of downloading? What are some of ways of transferring images to the computer?
There are several ways to transfer files from a camera to a computer, one, by USB cable, two, by plugging the SD into the computer, and three, sending files to the internet or a computer wirelessly.
Image sensors
16. In your own words, what is resolution? Describe the importance of image quality.
Image resolution is the amount of detail within an image. The higher the resolution, the better the picture. Resolution is measured by how many single squares a picture has on the vertical and horizontal planes. If an image has 1500 squares along the horizontal and 900 on the vertical plane, it has 1 350 000 pixels.
17. What is a megapixel? How does it relate to the quality of the photo?
A megapixel in photography is one million pixels. Generally speaking, a camera with a higher amount of megapixels gives a better, higher resolution picture.
Digital camera file formats
18. Summarise in your own words some of the basic formats your digital camera offers and why would you choose them.
18. Summarise in your own words some of the basic formats your digital camera offers and why would you choose them.
Three of the most commonly used photographic file formats are .jpeg, .tiff and “raw” format. The file ending “.jpeg” stands for Joint Photography Experts Group Standard. Whilst the .jpeg file format is the most common photographic format, it has the drawback of reducing the quality of an image, especially with repeated editing and saving. .Jpeg has a version that does not reduce file quality (called “lossless”) but it is not widely supported. TIFF, Tagged Image File Format, can be used for both lossless storage that does not reduce file quality and “lossy” storage that does cause some data to be lost. TIFF is the file format of choice in the printing industry. Raw format photography files have a similarity to the film photography negative. Using raw format files, a person can keep all the original data from a photo and improve it in their photo editing software with any loss of data form the original shot. Professional photographers are more likely to use raw format since there is less likelihood of their images being degraded during the storage process.
Preview screens & viewfinders
19. What is the difference between a preview screen and a viewfinder? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
A preview screen shows an image of a photo to the photographer before they take a photo. Seeing an image before taking a photo is valuable for aiding amateurs in photo composition. The downside of a preview screen is having less detail and the potential for shaky hands to blur the picture when they are held away from the body. A camera viewfinder is a window on a camera for looking through to see the images to be photographed. The benefit of a viewfinder is that users can see a real image rather than one digitally reproduced. Viewfinders use mirrors to show the image to be photographed and don’t lose detail in the shadows and bright spots like a digital image can.
Automatic flash
20. Explain the different flash modes on the digital camera.
20. Explain the different flash modes on the digital camera.
Several different kinds of flash modes in a camera are as follows:
Automatic: flash fires if the camera detects that there is not enough light in the scene
Fill flash: this is where flash is always on
Red eye reduction: this setting causes the flash to fire a couple of times before the shot so the subject’s pupil get smaller and are less likely to come up red in the photo.
Low-power mode: with this mode users can set the flash intensity to half it’s normal amount.
Batteries
21. Explain the different types of batteries available for digital cameras.
21. Explain the different types of batteries available for digital cameras.
Cameras use either lithium-ion or nickel metal hydride (NiMh) style batteries.
22. What do these icons mean? 1. And 2.
1 — This means battery full
2 - This means battery nearly empty.
Software
23. Describe some of the software that comes with the digital camera.
A digital camera usually comes with rudimentary software within it for altering photos. To make significant improvements in photos it is best to use external software such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom.
Meta Data
24. Information is recorded in a photo. Explain advantages of this and describe how you would insert this into a Photoshop file. What are tags? How can tags help the user?
24. Information is recorded in a photo. Explain advantages of this and describe how you would insert this into a Photoshop file. What are tags? How can tags help the user?
Meta data is information about the time and date that a photo was taken that is stored along with a photo in a camera’s memory. Meta data helps people find files by adding tags that users can search for. If someone is looking for a photo from a particular day, they can type that day into a search field and find the photo.
News Flash – Kodak has now folded and no longer exists.
25. How does this impact the digital camera market?
25. How does this impact the digital camera market?
The end of Kodak may be less significant for the digital camera market than you might expect. Even though Kodak was the inventor of the snapshot camera, it failed to embrace digital technology. The exit of Kodak from the market will probably do little to change the digital camera market, due to not selling much in the way of digital cameras.
HDR
26. What is HDR and how can you use it in your photography or your images?
26. What is HDR and how can you use it in your photography or your images?
HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Using the HDR function on your camera helps to compensate for the fact that digital photography does not traditionally represent the darkest and lightest areas of an image as they are in real life. HDR could be a significant improvement in digital photography as lack of gradation in the darker areas of a photo is where it traditionally lagged behind film.
