Silver Spring Camera Club Blog

PC Magazine - Digital Focus

2006-09-22T16:10:00.000-04:00

Dave Johnson's expert tips promise to enhance your expertise with your digital camera, scanner, printer, and image editing software. Here are links to some of his recent columns:

Photoshop: Profiles & the Print Dialog

2006-09-20T20:29:00.000-04:00

This was posted by Pedro:

The use of profiles and the print dialog box in Photoshop can be confusing. Why not select Printer Color Management instead of specifying a profile, and let the printer driver take over. If I use Epson paper on an Epson printer with Epson ink, shouldn't the photo print acurately?

Digital Cameras? A view from the year 2000...

2006-09-20T20:11:00.000-04:00

Originally published in the Oct 2000 Cable Release

On Going Digital Photographers laughed a few years ago when Apple first introduced their digital camera. It wouldn’t even make an acceptable passport picture. A few of those people are still laughing but most have begun to accept the idea that a digital camera is indeed plausible but the problems at the moment seem insurmountable. In a clipping from Washington Computer Usersent to the Cable Release by Garry Kreizman, Nelson King discusses a few of those problems, which when summarized, come down to three things:

resolution,
battery power and
storage.

At the moment, all three come with heavy price tags. Image quality is a function of how many pixels can be resolved on the image capture device called the CCD or Charge-Coupled Device. Resolution is typically stated in terms of the total pixels or vertical pixels times horizontal pixels. To reproduce a photograph of near 35mm quality, one needs a digital file that will reproduce about 300 pixels per inch both vertically and horizontally. This means a 5 x 7 inch print would require about 3.15 megapixels, the current limit on most consumer level digital cameras.

The more expensive cameras with the better battery packs will make about the equivalent of one roll of 35mm photographs, more if you avoid use of the LCD monitor. For a full day of photographing, you can figure at least another $100 in spare battery packs and then the problem of recharging everything before the next outing.

Storage is quite another problem and again quite expensive. One flash card costing about $90.00 will store the equivalent of one roll of 35mm film so you could wind up carrying several hundred dollars worth of storage media for a single day in the field. And the cards are fragile. There are other ways including downloading to a hard drive or laptop but you still have similar problems to deal with. King summarizes his investigation by saying he has decided to wait at least another six months before buying, partly because of the cost of operating the camera and partly because he is not quite sure they are good enough.

Patuxent Wildlife Refuge Field Trip - see pics

2006-09-17T14:23:00.000-04:00

More pics will get posted tonight. Please feel free to vote on the pics and make constructive comments. The photos are at: http://www.ssccphotography.org/coppermine/thumbnails.php?album=30

Note: various members almost got photographs of a large blue heron and a red fox. It's the day before hunting season at the refuge and the animals were definitely keeping a low profile...

Trip to Cuba

2006-09-02T20:40:00.001-04:00

Check out the pictures from Pedro's trip to Cuba. I'm sure he'll want to post some of the details...