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All pictures on this site have been formatted for online use. If you need better versions, contact me. What everyone should know about digital cameras Before you read on, I want to state that as of Sep 2009 the best pocket camera available is the Canon S90is. Canon has beaten out Fuji with this camera. Four years ago, Fuji set out to make an excellent low noise sensor for pocket cameras and succeeded. But this year Canon worked on this effort, and succeeded in a most spectacular way. For the first time ever, a pocket camera is available that can produce truthfully professional results without compromise. Don't be put off by the 10 megapixel rating and the 3.8X optical zoom, because for the first time ever in a pocket camera, every pixel counts. Even without the zoom there will be room to crop and what you pull out of an image will print more clearly than whatever you zoomed in on a competitors product. I am not a Canon guy, and I am not a Fuji guy, I am a best camera guy and for the first time ever I am absolutely blown away by a camera that will go in a pocket. So far this sensor only belongs to the S90is, and I do hope to see it in other Canon products soon - congratulations Canon, for the first time you have a product that no one can compete with, not even Pentax or Nikon. Thank you for FINALLY raising the bar. In the digital camera world, megapixels no longer mean a whole lot. If your camera has more than three megapixels (and that's all of them nowadays, with many having more than 10) the most important things are the lens, and the actual quality of the CCD. The CCD is what serves as the "film" in a digital camera, and the pixel quality - not how many megapixels - is what really matters as of 2009. Most manufacturers have thrown pixel quality out the window in favor of a high megapixel rating, and today's high megapixel count cameras are most often not one bit better than the more modest cameras of a few years ago. Some salesmen claim that a high pixel count helps make cropped images more clear, but this is not true unless your camera cost over $1,000, even if it's a Canon. (update, the Canon S90is fits this bill now with a street price of only $399!) This is because a small lens and poor quality pixels cause the image to appear smudged and lifeless when cropped and then blown up to print size. For clear cropped prints you really need good pixels to work with. Back in the days of film, you could by a $20 camera that would use the same film as a $2000 camera. But it would give you modest results, just like what most pocket digital cameras give you nowadays. To prove this point, I have posted a 1 (one) megapixel picture here for you to click on, which was taken on a semi-professional camera. It will be a better picture than almost any pocket camera you happen to have could ever hope to produce even when left at full resolution. To really see what I am talking about, save the picture to your desktop and open it with the Windows picture viewer and click "magnify" a few times. The Windows Jpeg summing will not cause it to break up until after it has been EXTREMELY magnified. This is a ONE megapixel picture that will print a nice 8X10 and could be pushed a lot farther if you upsampled and accepted some quality loss (which would not be as bad as many pocket cameras) posing swan Don't use the browser, it won't work well enough to show you. This is what a salesman who is trying to sell megapixels does not know enough to tell you. A lowly 1 (one) megapixel image that was taken on a professional quality camera and THEN compressed downto only 200K file size will match or beat the best picture from just about any ten megapixel pocket or super zoom camera, even if it consumes five megabytes of memory, guranteed. If you want to take pictures like this one, you need an SLR. Imagine how great the original version of this picture must be. Buying a good camera - not necessarily the one that is fashionable - can put you on the path to taking great pictures A good pocket camera will have
1. a good lens That is what you look for in a pocket camera, do not worry about megapixels. To see how good any pocket camera is, set it's ISO speed to 1600 and snap a test shot. View the results at full magnification on the camera's screen. If at full magnification the picture is clean and crisp with no color blotching or texture, it is most likely a good camera. Do this, rather than believe a salesman, salespeople tend to be stunningly ignorant of the products they sell, and this is especially true for cameras which are a complex subject. Most tend to favor specific brands, and usually do not know anything about photography at all, let alone the cameras they sell. No brand makes consistently good or bad cameras. They ALL make winners, and they ALL make losers.(Update - Canon's S90is now makes all others losers!) Salesmen just can't seem to figure that out. If you are going to spend your hard earned money on an expensive item like a camera, enter the store well informed with the exact make and model or models you are interested in, and if you don't find what you want, go to another store. You will fare better in a dedicated camera store because those tend to attract knowledgeable staff (not guranteed though), and most likely you won't pay a penny more than elsewhere. Right now ALL makes of digital cameras are about to be discontinued and the next cameras coming in will be revolutionary. All manufacturers are dropping virtually all 2007 models and they will be releasing the new cameras in March of 2008. Update - (2009 models are the same as last year for the most part and Fuji is still the best small camera) This is going to be a spectacular year in digital photography, with cameras that have unheard of capabilities going mainstream for the first time. So if you can wait until June, when the winners and losers have been sorted out that will be the time to buy. There is a process I follow when buying a new camera. First I check the review sites, and read the reviews in detail. Then I surf out all the first hand user's opinions - which get posted in abundance. I always download many sample images of many shooting situations. When I think I have found one that will satisfy me, I buy it. (update - if you have $500 to drop on a pocket camera, for the camera and memory, ect, get the S90is, it is so amazing that for the first time ever I am telling people what to buy). The best site is dpreview.com, because they do extensive testing and are not afraid to tell you when a camera is no good. Any "highly recommended" camera there will be a winner. Steves-digicams.com is also good, and he provides you with test shots that are consistent enough to let you compare different cameras. Kudos to him for doing that. Finally, dcresource.com is another great reviewer. None of these three sites ever exhibit any bias toward brands.
________________________________________________________ USAGE GUIDELINES: Yes you can: Print for homework, even college. If you are in college, you can make a request and if the image is not already among the thousands I have already archived, I just might try to go out and get it for you - I always like to photograph even mundane items and would be happy to help a student. Much higher resolutions than what is posted are available, and may be provided to college students in advanced studies for free. Make sure you mention that in your e-mail subject line and I will make sure I read your message. You may:
Print for personal postcards, You may use the pictures as a background for your Myspace and others. On most pictures there is a reference to this site. That is one way I am driving traffic here, so you should keep it visible on your myspace page - don't cover it with other stuff. If it is not visible on your myspace, I will change it's location in the Jpeg, always somewhere along the border so it won't look bad, in a way that will always be visible no matter what computer hits it. It will be done with small print in a way that is not annoying like those stupid blinking ads, it will be as prominent as you see it on the image now. Of course, with thousands of people using this site, I most likely will never get to whatever you posted so it is basically an honor system, and I don't expect you to leave the text visible if your page layout really needs to cover it. If you want you could post a link to my site, that would be great. I reserve the right to make changes to this site as I please, even if they mess up the way other locations transfer pictures from this one. Of course I will be extremely careful not to mess anything up, but mistakes can happen and I have to reserve this right, just in case they do. _______________________________________________________________________________ I am not the only person providing life to this site, so if anything happens to me I have instructed others to keep it going - pictures are not likely to vanish suddenly and mess your site up as a result. This site is carefully administered by a brilliant tech and mistakes are not often made. FOR USE IN WEB SITES: I encourage you to use any of the pictures you find here on your own web site. If possible, use my server to host the images. But of course site layouts vary, and usually pictures need to be scaled to fit. If you need to do that, do it but of course you must host the picture yourself after doing so. I don't expect the text in the image to survive whatever processing you do, but I still want a reference to this site somewhere on your site. The best thing to do is place a link to this site on yours. I don't expect it to be put in a prominent place; a small text link at the bottom of a page where no one goes but the search engines will do just fine. A search engine will not see the page as people do, so placement of that link is irrellevant as long as a crawler can find it. Don't use invisible text however, because the search engines will lower your site ranking if you do. Of course, if you want to make the link prominent I certainly won't argue with it. I am a serious amateur photographer, and I am using this site to get my pictures out to the world, rather than have them sit on a lonely hard drive. So this site has nothing but my own images, and I will not host pictures from other sources. At present this is a non-profit site with a .com extension. Currently I get more than 300,000 hits a month from about 11,000 unique users. Approximately 1,600 web locations use my pictures. February's updates increased traffic significantly, although I certainly am pleased with how well things have gone with such a basic start. Link to a page on my site, always welcome! This site is a mega bandwidth juggernaut. Don't worry about my bandwidth - I certainly don't! YOU MUST RECIEVE PERMISSION BEFORE: Putting pictures in a work that will be printed and published Incorporating pictures into software or using them for any commercial purpose other than web sites or workplace presentations Using pictures for advertising campaigns Using the pictures for any political or social cause whatsoever, even those which left the spotlight decades ago and are no longer recognized as the causes they once were. Much higer resolution images than what is posted on this site will be provided if I see fit. Thanks for visiting!
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