A PICTURE OF GARRY Garry Garrett's Homepage


Cameras

This page is largely for links to information about cameras and photography in general. It's primary focus (pun intended) is on information about cameras I own. Once you take the photos, you'll want to check out my page on Creative Stuff so that you can see what to do with them.

My Photos

Cameras I own

On-Line Photo Developers

Now-a-days, the photo department of your typically department store will accept many kinds of digital media and give you traditional prints (some places even have "self serve" machines to do this, but I question the quality - I suspect they have a garden variety ink jet printer with photo paper in it, the same quality you could get it home, or if you have a good printer, worse). Some On-Line web sites will allow you to upload your photos, which you can then request them to make prints of, and they will send them to you. You can also, typically, e-mail your friends and family with the information so that they can order prints too. That's what these links are for.

Misc

Tips

Camera Terminology

Thumbnail
A "Thumbnail sketch" is a small sketch (maybe the size of a thumbnail) that an artist does before doing a painting or drawing to figure out how they want it to look. It is not very detailed. They may try serveral thumbnails, until they hit upon a perspective that they choose to go with.

Digital photos can be quite large. Rather than put a whole bunch of photos on a web page, typically what you will do is take your high quality (and thus large size) photos and shrink them down to something smaller, that takes less time to download. These smaller versions of images are called "thumbnails". You then make the thumbnails be links to the larger (higher quality) versions of the photos. This gives the person viewing your photos a number of smaller photos that are quickly and easily downloaded, which they can use to to pick from and choose which of the high quality images they want to download.

Where I have made thumbnails, you can download the thumbnail by moving your mouse pointer to that thumbnail, hold down on the right mouse button, and there should be an option to save the image (the thumbnail). If you want to download the full image, click on the thumbnail, and your web browser will download and display the whole image. You can then use your web browser's "Save As ..." (usually found under the "File" pulldown menu) to save the image. My camera has an option called "E-Mail Mode" where it will save the picture in whatever size it is configured to, and it will save a smaller version of it. The idea is that you could use this smaller version to send to others in a e-mail (particularly if they have a dial-up connection and sending the large version would take a long time). If I were making thumbnails from scratch (i.e. using my image editing software to shink the pictures down); I'd probably make them a tad smaller than what e-mail mode produces, but by using the "E-Mail mode" pictures as thumbnails, I save myself quite a bit of time and effort. My "thumbnails" may seem a tad bit on the large size, but the time and effort to create my own just isn't worth it.



Pixel
This is a dot. The more dots, the bigger the picture. Two photos of the same thing, the one with more pixels, the higher the quality (having said that, if you have a crappy lense, then you get a really high quality picture of a fuzzy image, etc.). The related term "Megapixel" implies that there are a million (or more) total pixels. Photos are two dimensional images. Their sizes, in pixels, are expressed by the length and width of the photo. For example, a photo may be 640x480. The old VGA style PC monitors had 640x480 pixels, so this size is commonly refered to as VGA size. When you refer to Megapixels, you are refering to the total number of pixels.

In film cameras, such as 35mm, the film is composed of small "grains" that absorb light as they are exposed. The "grains" are the equivalent of pixels. If you enlarge an image too much, it starts to get "grainy" (i.e. it gets blurry as you can see the dots of the grains).

One of the reasons that artistic types tended to use black and white film is that you get a sharper image. Color film has 4 grains per "dot": one red, one green and two blue (the human eye is more senstive to blue light). In black and white film, with the same number of grains, each grain is varies from black to white, so you get 4 times as many useable grains. It is this sharpness that is the quality that artists go for; there is nothing inherently artistic about black and white. With digital cameras, there are color receptors (CCD are the most common these days - as you might suspect, there are twice as many blue as red and green). The information from the 4 receptors is combined to encode a RGB (Red, Green, Blue) value for the pixel. If your digital camera supports taking black and white digital photos, it simply converts the color image into a black and white image (using the same algorythms that your image editing software does, only your camera's CPU is considerably slower than your computer's). You don't get any more pixels by going with black and white, unlike film where you get four times the number of grains. There is no value in taking black and white digital pictures. Still, many cameras support this feature, because people who think there is some sort of inherent artistic value to black and white photos buy cameras too.



Aspect Ratio
This is the ratio of witdth and height (some formats refer to heigth and then width, whereas other refer to width and then heigth - the important part is the ratio). TV screens, computer monitors, etc. have a 4:3 aspect ratio. If the width is 4x, then the height is 3x. 35mm film has an aspect ratio of 3:2. This is best preserved by 4x6 prints.

Most digital cameras will take pictures with a 4:3 aspect ratio. You may get some of the top and bottom of the picture cut off if you print a 4x6 print (or perhaps your software will distort the image). Most of the image sizes on my MVC-CD500 use a 4:3 aspect ratio - 4.5 Megapixel size has a 3:2 aspect ratio. Having said that, many of the features of my camera have the caveot "does not work with 4.5 Megapixels".

Loosing part of the image is nothing new. 3x5 prints have a 5:3 aspect ratio. 8x10 prints have a 5:4 aspect ratio. If the original 35mm negative is 3:2, something has to give.

Incidentally, 35mm camera film came from taking movie film (then using a 4:3 aspect ratio today's films use more like a 16:9 aspect ratio) and using 2 "frames" to make one still picture. The movie frames, vs. the still camera frames are sideways. So, a 4:3 ratio next to a 4:3 ratio became a 4:6 ratio, turned sideways, a 6:4 ratio a.k.a. 3:2 ratio.



CCD
Charge Coupled Device - a type of digital imaging.
CMOS
Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor - a type of digial imaging.


f-stops aperature
The f-stop is a measure of the aperature. The smaller the f-stop, the greater the field of depth. The larger the f-stop (i.e. smaller aperature), the less light that comes in the camera. The smaller the f-stop (i.e. the larger the aperature) the more light that comes in the camera.


Pictures per MB of storage
16MB 32MB 64MB 128MB 256MB
1MP 20-44 40-48 100-150 160-250 320-550
2MP 16-32 32-64 64-122 128-220 256-480
3MP 10-20 20-40 40-90 80-150 160-300
4MP 6-16 12-32 24-64 42-128 96-256
5MP 3-12 8-28 24-58 38-92 76-180


Recommended Print Size
megapixels Max Recommended Print Size
1 4x6
2 5x7
3 8x10
4 11x14
5 16x20


Aperature 2.2f 4f 5.6f 8f 11f 16f
100 ISO Film
Shutter Speed 500 250 125 60 30 15
400 ISO Film
Shutter Speed - - 500 250 125 60


Aspect Size Type
3:2 36mm x 24mm 35mm Film
3:2 4" x 6" 4x6 photo
5:4 8" x 10" 8x10 photo
4:3 misc TV
4:3 640x480 pixels VGA Computer Monitor
4:3 800x600 pixels Computer Monitors
4:3 1024x768 pixels Computer Monitors
16:9 misc HDTV
16:9 ??? 70mm Movie Film

Flash Cards. My digital camera writes on CD-Rs, but most use Flash ROM/RAM based cards. This is a list of the form factors and types I know of (that my card reader will read):

Last Updated: 30-Jul-2007

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