Program presented at the April 18, 2011 meeting of the Lenawee PC Users Group by Bob Warwick.
Our new computer projector does a great job of displaying the information that is normally shown on the view finder of my somewhat dated, but very typical, digital camera. We will walk through the indicators and the menus of the camera, discussing what they are telling us, and how to use standard features that are built into just about every digital camera. If you brought your camera to the meeting, turn it on and see how your camera represents the features. Every camera is a little different, but once you see what it looks like and what it does on one camera, I think you can the find same feature on your camera.
First, let's put your camera in AUTO mode and see what kind of things you can adjust.
A. Set the Date and Time.
a. The date and time doesn't really have to be set because you usually don't want it printed on you picture. However, it is hidden in the information that is stored with the picture and can be used by programs like Picasa to sort you pictures into the order that you took them, among other uses. There is a menu selection if you want the information printed on your picture.
B. Choose how much information you want to save in each picture.
a. For example you don't need 10 megabytes of pixels to print a snapshot from your memory card. The snapshot can't display that amount of pixel information. Nor do you need more than a megabyte of information for a picture that is going to be displayed on somebody's computer monitor.
b. If you plan to show your pictures on a high resolution 50" flat screen TV or blow your pictures up to poster size, then you want to save more pixel information.
c. You will also need to save more pixels if you plan to edit or crop your picture in Picasa or some other editing program. If you have a big memory card in your camera and, you don't need the space, just shoot away at the highest resolution. You can always reduce the size of the picture if you want to email it to someone, but you can't add pixels to a picture that you haven't saved! If you looked at the pictures from my Galapagos trip, Richard shot all of his photos at 23 megabytes, and mailed them to be on four DVDs! Picasa reduced them down automatically to be shown on the website.
C. Now we are ready to understand a bit more about our camera, first in AUTO mode, then some of the handy advanced features. Let's do it exactly the way you would explore your camera. You would get out the Manual and you would work your way through, trying out the different features on your camera. As I started to do the same, in preparation for doing this program, I found several features that I have never used because I hadn't stumbled across them. So read the manual with your camera in hand! My manual is here.