Digital Photography

Digital Photography Tips 4

When you take a digital photograph the dslr does not immediately write the file to the flash card but writes to a buffer, a temporary memory storage within the camera. The buffer will hold only a certain amount of data and when the limit is reached, it does not allow the camera to take any more photos(called lockout) until the ones in buffer have been written to the storage card(CF or SD). The number of photos that can be held in buffer is called the burst size. Photos can be downloaded from your camera to the computer via a USB cable or you can take the storage card out of the camera and put it into a card reader that is connected to the computer(usually via a USB cable as well, or a firewire cable).

Digital SLR cameras have a RAW mode that will allow you to change such settings as exposure in the relevant software such as LightRoom on the computer. RAW DSLR camera files need to be converted to a TIFF file for further processing or presentation. TIFF files are not compressed, so they can get very large. JPEG files are compressed and take up less space. But remember that every time you save a JPEG file, some quality is lost. Using RAW will minimize any chance of getting noise in images and will allow greater exposure flexibility at the conversion stage.

White Balance refers to the colour temperature of the light that is available to the camera lens. Cameras need to know what colour white is so that the correct color is calibrated when shooting in varying conditions such as outdoors and sunny and indoors with tungsten lighting. Your DSLR camera will have a number of WB(White Balance) presets such as Auto White Balance(AWB) , Daylight Sunny, Daylight Shade, Flash, Indoor Fluorescent Light, Indoor Tungsten Light, etc. RAW conversion Software such as LightRoom will allow you to change the White Balance setting later but it is a good idea to get it right the first time.

ICC(International Colour Convention) profiles are industry colour standards, and the two that are used commonly are Adobe 1998 and sRGB. Adobe 1998 is widely used in the print media where sRGB is used for the internet. Commonly DSLR cameras are set on sRGB because most computers are based on sRGB.

Most DSLR cameras will provide a sharpening parameter. It may be a good idea to set this at its minimum level or off if you can do so. You can always sharpen your photographs later in Photoshop.

Noise is created by high ISO levels and long exposures. Photos taken at ISO 100 will be relatively less noisy than a photograph taken at ISO 800. It is probably a good idea to avoid any ISO setting above ISO 400 in order to reduce the possibility of noise in your photographs. If you have to use higher ISO settings then you have to but there will be a risk of introduced noise in the finished photo.

For managing your digital photo files, Downloader pro renames your files and adds copyright information. Aperture is a very good program for managing your photos if you own a mac computer. If you want a free alternative then give Picasa from Google a go. Adobe Lightroom can be used to edit and add keywords to each photo in your collection. Photo mechanic can be used for importing , data and renaming your digital photo files.