Digital Photography is awesome, but sometimes photographing digits can be frustrating. Some pictures are blurry, and the good ones take forever to upload anywhere. The software that came with the camera is just crap. Photoshop is for geeks, and nobody wants to spend money of software that should come with your camera anyways ).

I’m by no means an expert on these subjects, but here are a few tips I’ve come up with over the years that have helped a few people so I’ll share them again here.

Memory Cards vs. USB Connection

If you’re looking for a digital camera make sure it comes with a memory card. You can buy a USB memory card reader for just a few bucks if your PC is not so equipped. Why does this matter? It’s so much easier to just take the card from the camera to the computer instead of having to connect the camera to your PC and use it’s, often very crappy, software to get the photos. Of course, if you’ve gotten a really nice digital camera then you’ll want play around with some of the features that you can use while it’s connected to the PC via USB.

MSPaint – Now with circles!

Not the most versatile graphics editing program, but if it’s all you have on hand its good for a few things. It is possible to shrink a JPEG files size, in most cases by more than 50%, by opening the file in MSPaint (right click – edit by default or open with.. paint) and simply re saving it. This is helpful for photos off of your digital camera that are often near 1000 KB mostly due to the full uncompressed color palate saved to each file. Saving with MSPaint reduces the palate to its minimum and dithers the image slightly to compress as much data as possible without loss of color depth or resolution.

Other formats supported by MSPaint are:

The Bitmap family (*.bmp and *.dib); Good for preserving the exact color of each pixel, but takes up relatively large amounts of data depending on the color depth format used which are: Monochrome, 16 Color (4-bit), 256 Color (8-bit), and 24-bit being the most colors at 16.7 million)

The JPEG family – or

Joint Photographic Experts Group

is a format made to transmit high quality images over the internet using as little bandwidth as possible. These file extensions include: *.JPEG, *.JPG, *.JFIF, and *.JPE.

GIF

– or Graphics Interchange Format is a varation of the bitmap format that CompuServe made to speed up graphic downloads in the pre-broadband days. It’s still used frequently today, and is a common way to make small animations called “Animated GIFs”.

TIFF and PNG are outdated variations of Bitmap formats not commonly used on PCs.

Print Screen

Ever wonder about that “Prt Scr” key on your keyboard? Go ahead and press it – I know you want to. Now open that Paint program that Microsoft spent two hours making back in 1988 up, and press CTRL+V. You can find a lot of uses for this bit of magic including, but not limited to:

Resizing and cropping photos whilst maintaining there aspect ratio, without a licensed copy of some over-priced editing suite, can be done by viewing the photo in the default Image Viewer, and resizing the window. If the viewer is set to fit the image in the window it will resize it and keep its aspect ratio. Now you can take a screen shot, paste it to Paint, select the area you’d like to keep, copy it, open a new file, paste it there, and finally save it making sure to use the JPEG format to limit file size.

I use the print screen key to blog about things on the internet that a link just won’t work for like, adds I find funny. Or sometimes a link may be unreliable for things that may be changed or maybe you just don’t want people to have to open a link. It’s also good for capturing images on the Internet that are either comprised of several images or in a Flash/Shockwave animation. You can also capture a screen shot in a movie, video game, or media player visuals make great wallpapers/backgrounds.

The Shutter Buttons Secret

The shutter button on every digital camera I’ve ever used has been a dual function switch. It works in conjunction with your cameras auto-focus. Lightly applying pressure will allow for a pre-capture focus adjustment. Usually you’ll notice the image on the display screen sharpen, and after that you press the button down the rest of the way to take the photo. Most new cameras have very good auto-focus features that often go unused because they need time to adjust the aperture size and shutter speed. So if you’ve wondered why your $200 camera takes a lot of blurry pictures it’s not because you got ripped off.

Macro Mode

Or the “little flower icon” is a great feature on all digital cameras. If you’ve ever wondered how to take an extremely detailed close up of an object (oh, say a flower or mushroom) this is what you were looking for. Any further explanation of this feature can be found in your cameras manual (there’s usually a copy on the CD that came with it).