Let’s talk digital!

I think it is about time to talk about dig­i­tal, and specif­i­cally dig­i­tal images, how to label them, how to view them and most impor­tantly how and with what to cap­ture them. As you may or may not know I am a pho­tog­ra­pher and have been one for well over 50 years. I grew up with a dark room and had one avail­able for most of my adult life. While I enjoyed my years of play­ing in the dark, I was always hounded by a per­sis­tant feel­ing that the process could not keep up with my cre­ative vision. Many of my tech­niques would take hours and even days to turn out an accept­able result. Well…that all changed with the intro­duc­tion of dig­i­tal imag­ing! I bought my first dig­i­tal cam­era in 2000, a small 3 mega-pixel Nikon for $850.00 and it was all plas­tic! when Nikon came out with the first dig­i­tal SLRs ( sin­gle lens reflex which allows you se through the lens instead of a rangefinder) I resisted because of it’s $5k + price and instead waited for the D-100 which was a lit­tle more afford­able. Within less than a year of pur­chas­ing that cam­era I had already out­grown it. As a pro­fes­sional I needed some­thing that could focus fast, hold more than 3 frames in its mem­ory buffer and repro­duce good color.  So what is my point? …Tak­ing a risk and being an early adapter opened new doors for me and released the pent up demons that were haing on from film. I also wanted you to know that I have been doing this for a long time and feel that it is impor­tant for me to share what I have learned.

Where we are going…

If you are read­ing this post it is prob­a­bly safe to say you as an artist are think­ing about doing your own jury/pr pho­tos and are a bit con­fused by all the choices. So here is what we will be cov­er­ing in this article:

• The basics why all mega-pixels are not cre­ated equal
• The most impor­tant part of the cam­era or where to put your $$$$
• Mem­ory cards

In other arti­cles  of this series we will cover

• Shoot­ing your own photos
• Putting your pho­tos into your computer
• Soft­ware for edit­ing and organizing
• Pro­tect your images
• Impor­tance of back-up
• Label­ing your dig­i­tal media

The basics

One of the first things peo­ple think about and ask about when con­sid­er­ing a dig­i­tal cam­era is Mega-pixels, the term is used by cam­era com­pa­nies mainly to adver­tise to an unknow­ing pub­lic. With­out being tech­ni­cal lets take a look at what these things called pix­els are.

The eas­i­est way to think of pix­els is to com­pare them to dots of ink on printed mat­ter except the copari­son ends there. Briefly a pixel is like a bucket that stores infor­ma­tion, in the case of a dig­i­tal cam­era it stores color infor­ma­tion. Dig­i­tal sen­sors con­tain mega-pixels which col­lec­tively receive and store color infor­ma­tion. But as I men­tioned ear­lier all pix­els are not cre­ated equal. The eas­i­est way to visu­al­ize this is to think of 2 glasses each of the same diam­e­ter but one 3x the height of the other. Which one holds the most water? Duh.…the taller one! When describ­ing a dig­i­tal camera’s abil­ity to cap­ture a thor­ough representation

the col­ors it sees its’ pix­els need to be able hold as many color pho­tons as pos­si­ble. In this case the color spec­trum is rep­re­sented as Red Green and Blue so there need to be enough pix­els to cap­ture each color. But it doesn’t stop there… remem­ber the glass exam­ple? The same con­cept applies here, the depth and sur­face size of a pixel deter­mines the sen­sors abil­ity to cap­ture more colors.This is known as bit depth, the greater the bit depth the bet­ter the color range and resolution.

Now that you are totally con­fused, lets look at this in real­ity. The cam­eras shown above are DSLRS they have inter­change­able lenses and gen­er­ally have a greater bit depth than point and shoot cam­eras like the ones below. So even though a $399.00 point and shoot has 14+ mega-pixels it can­not cap­ture as wide a range of color as my $5k 12 mega-pixel DSLR. The rea­son is in size and depth of the pixel buck­ets (along with other tech stuff which I won’t go into here) so the point and shoot may have an 8 bit depth to its’ pix­els while my DSLR has 24.  The point and shoot can only rep­re­sent 256 col­ors while mine can rep­re­sent 16,777,216.

The most impor­tant part of the camera

Now that you under­stand (?) the pixel thing and you won’t let that sales­per­son entrance you with a mantra of mega-pixels lets look at what else is really impor­tant. Believe it or not the absolute most impor­tant part of any cam­era is its’ lens. If the lens is not good the light it trans­fers to either film or dig­i­tal sen­sor will also not pro­duce a good image. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, there are far fewer lense ele­ments within a point and shoot lens and often those ele­ments are not glass and if they are glass they are not ground to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions as those for a DSLR which are inter­change­able. Fur­ther­more, there is a direct cor­re­la­tion­be­tween the  money spent on a lens and it’s qual­ity. You see where I am going with this right? If you want to be your own pho­tog­ra­pher and get the best images pos­si­ble of you work it is impor­tant to look at pixel bit depth and lens qual­ity. We’ll go into cam­era fea­tures as selec­tion cri­te­ria later.

The dif­fer­ence…

So given this infor­ma­tion am I say­ing you need to spend $5K for a cam­era? Of course not but you do need to be aware of what you are buy­ing and the dif­fer­ences so your work can be cap­tured as best as pos­si­ble. The real dif­fer­ence is in the fea­tures and flex­i­bil­ity and ease of use of those fea­tures. You will be pho­tograph­ing your work against a back­ground using some sort of arti­fi­cial light­ing and you are going to want to have those images not only rep­re­sent the color of your work as accu­rately as pos­si­ble you will also want it to show the depth as in the case of 3D work. So accu­rately show­ing the full depth of 3D work is very much depen­dent of the camera’s abil­ity to keep the entire depth of the piece in focus. Two key fea­tures that make that hap­pen are the abil­ity to change the f-stop of the lens sim­i­lar to the retina of your eye it helps to  con­trols how much light is let in by chang­ing the diam­e­ter of the area let­ting in the light. The other fea­ture is the shut­ter speed which con­trols how long the light is allowed to enter to the sen­sor. These two fea­tures work­ing together pro­duce  the Depth of Field (DOF) or the depth of the area that is being pho­tographed that is in full focus.

If you have ever seen a pho­to­graph of some­one or some­thing that is in sharp focus and the back­ground is blurry you are see­ing depth of field. It is impor­tant when you are pho­tograph­ing your work to be able to not only adjust you DOF but also be able to pre­view it. Why… because you want your work to be ALL in focus and not just part.

Now to con­fuse you even more there is another fea­ture that comes into play when talk­ing about Depth of

Field and that is the light sen­si­tiv­ity range of the sen­sor which is called its’ ISO. The greater the ISO range gen­er­ally the more flex­i­bil­ity you have in mak­ing adjust­ments. The range is usu­ally mea­sured from 200 to as high as 3200, the lower num­ber mean­ing that the whole sys­tem needs more light to get a good shot and the higher end is for those shots in dark rooms. The beauty of dig­i­tal cam­eras is that unlike film cam­eras you can adjust this range on a shot by shot basis. Film was not as flex­i­ble, each role had a rat­ing and that was it, if your light con­di­tions changed mid role you had to either change film or do magic in the dark room.

So, to sum­ma­rize about the dif­fer­ence between point and shoot and DSLR…

Light flex­i­bil­ity

• Point & Shoot offers lower price but less flex­i­bil­ity to work under lights by not being able to work f-stop,shutterspeed and ISO together.
• DSLR offers pric­ing not  much higher than a point & shoot and greater flex­i­bil­ity to shoot under lights because it gives you more flex­i­bil­ity with f-stop, sht­ter speed and ISO and gen­er­ally a higher ISO range.

Color range

• Point & shoots are gen­er­ally lim­ited to lower bit depth in their sen­sor pix­els thus lim­it­ing the color range.
• DSLRs gen­er­ally have a greater bit depth that cap­tures greater color range

Lens

• Point & shoots gen­er­ally have much lower qual­ity lenses with fewer ele­ments and often no glass instead plastic.
• DSLRs have the abil­ity to inter­change lenses and even the lower end lenses included in most kits are bet­ter than those found on Point & shoots.

Stor­ing those pitchers!

Dig­i­tal cam­eras store their pic­tures on mem­ory cards point and shoot cam­eras and some lower end DSLRs small Secure Dig­i­tal (SD) cards while higher end cam­eras use Com­pact Flash (CF) cards. For the per­pose of this dis­cus­sion the dif­fer­ence is mostly in what the cam­era will accept, the con­ve­nience of use, and the num­ber of images that can be stored.  They both accom­plish the same thing so the real impor­tant dif­fer­ence to be aware of is the qual­ity of the card and the rep­u­ta­tion of the man­u­fac­turer. As always you get what you pay for, cheaper cards are prone to fail­ure some­thing you won’t know until you start down­load­ing and dis­cover noth­ing is on the card!! Lexar and San­disk are the lead­ers with San­disk hav­ing a lower fre­quency of failure.

The great thing about dig­i­tal is that once you buy your cards that is it, unlike film we had recur­ring costs asso­ci­ated with using film. Prices for dig­i­tal media now are very afford­able and will just keep get­ting that way. So one impor­tant thing to remem­ber is not to buy just one card, buy a cou­ple not only to have more image cap­ture abil­ity, but also to have back-up incase you lose a card. This is espe­cially true with SD cards because of their size.

That’s all for now stay tuned for the next installment..What to look for in a dig­i­tal camera.

I would love to hear from you as to whether this was help­ful, leave a com­ment below