DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE WEB A showing of how the digital camera works along with explanations of settings and other aspects of your camera. By: Michael Fradsham 11/4/13
T H E D I G I TA L C A M E R A IN A NUT SHELL ď ś Many people around the world are unsure of how the digital camera works. This is understandable due to the many aspects of this object. In short, all digital cameras contain a built in computer that record images electronically. Digital cameras focus light onto a semiconductor to create a digital image which differs from the conventional cameras that focus this light onto a piece of film. These cameras encode the image digitally and can store it for later reproduction.
HOW IT WORKS
MEGAPI XELS SETTI NGS ď ś The word Pixel is derived from PIcture ELement. When you are looking at an image, you are most likely seeing a smooth image. If you zoom closer and closer, the image may appear to get more blurry, and then you will begin to notice pixels. Pixels are the small squares that you will see as you begin to magnify the image. Every image is composed of millions of tiny squares and these are what makes the image sharp. What a megapixel is, is one million of these tiny pixels, used as a measure of the resolution in the digital cameras.
MEGAPIXELS (PRINT SIZE AND RESOLUTION)
WHAT PIXELS LOOK LIKE
RATIO SETTING ď ś The ratio setting relate to the ratio of the lengths of the sides of the images. For example, 35mm film frame is roughly 36mm wide and 24mm high. This image has an aspect ratio of 36:24 which can also be seen as 3:2. There are a lot of digital cameras
that give you the option to choose from multiple ratios, each having its own characteristics. You can also crop an image to a different ratio, which would have been unheard of in years past.
A N A S P E C T R AT I O C A N BE SEEN AS SO ON A CAMERA
DOWNLOADING IMAGES Downloading images can be fairly easy by following these steps. 1. Connect the cable that came with your camera to the corresponding port on your computer. 2. A Window should pop up on your screen showing that it has detected you camera. 3. Select the photos on this window on which you would like to have on your computer. 4. Select import, and you have successfully downloaded a picture!
B E S T P R AC T I C E F O R U S I N G D I G I T A L I M AG E S F R O M YO U R C A M E R A O N T H E W E B
ď ś The best practice for using digital images from your camera on the web include that you should edit and optimize digital images to load quickly with a reasonable size before
using on the web. These images should be less than 800 pixels wide or 700 pixels tall. In addition, the resolution of the image should be 72.
SAVE FOR WEB ď ś The save for web feature optimizes images and puts it in a format that can be saved for the web. This is typically a feature on Adobe Photoshop. You can choose between three file types; .jpg, .png, and .gif. Once the file type is chosen Photoshop then reduces the file size to high, medium, or low quality. By doing this it improves the loading time and then it changes the resolution of the image to 72.
BEST PRACTICES FOR N A M I N G D I G I TA L IMAGES
First off, every letter in the file name should be lowercase. This file name should state the name of the topic, where it was taken, and who took it. To separate specific parts of the file use dashes rather than underscores and white spaces, because underscores don’t show up in links, and white spaces will be filled with %20. You should try not to use forward and back slashes, and you can’t use any forbidden characters including &*$^! etc.
THE END ď ś -Love, Michael James Fradsham