Fen's Digital Photography Page

Fen Labalme
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Fen's Digital Photography Page

I've been taking digital photos for almost three years and as of February, 2004 have more than 19,000 photos (over 12 Gigabytes) stored online. Many people ask me questions about how to get the most from their digital cameras, so I have assembled some of my thoughts here. I hope that you find this useful -- and send me some photos! Note: most of the text below was written in February of 2002, and thus specifics may be somewhat dated. But the general concepts hold, so read on.

--Fen

Overview of how I got started
Essential Accessories
Reviews
Where to buy
Some of my Photo Directories
Technical Links
1. The Perl scripts I use to make my photo directories
The (privacy enhanced) FDIL Copyright

Overview

I started my digital camera experience with a Panasonic PalmCam PV-DC2090 I bought to document a Road Sage trip in June of 1999. It had many of the basic features I desired (optical zoom, compactflash memory, ...) and surprisingly good picture quality. It was just good enough to make me realize that I wanted to go digital, but not good enough to satisfy me general phototography requirements.

So I started looking for a new camera to do most of my shooting with, and in January of 2000 I traded up to the Nikon Coolpix 950. A great little camera! Elaine and I love to use the swivel feature to take quick and easy hand-held self-portraits where ever we go.

In February of 2002 I bought a Nikon 995 for $500 as the price just dropped dramtically after the introduction of the hot new 5000. There may be a touch of sour grapes here, but IMO the 5000's best feature is that it's dropped the price of the 995! You may not need the 5000's five megapixel resolution, as 8"x10" prints from the 995 and they look great. (Remember that most computer screens display less than one megapixel!) Do you want bigger shots that take more memory (and thus require large memory cards)? If you do, you might want to look at "prosumer" digital cameras, such as the Nikon D100 (around $3000). There was a small problem with the flash sensor in my 995, and in September I traded up to a Nikon 4500 which is a sweet camera.

Caveat: OK, there's one thing that bugs me about the Nikon coolpix line, but this is an issue with most all non-professional digital cameras - it's slow (in photographic terms) meaning that it performs poorly in low light situations. The best low-light digital camera I know of for under $1000 is the Sony DSC-F717 (which is almost all lens!) and though it does swivel, it won't swivel 180 degrees for self portraits. But for most normal shooting conditions, the coolpix line performs admirably (and they take incredible macros).

And finally, there are many more good cameras these days. Canon (particularly the cool PowerShot G3), Fuji, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus and Sony make some of the best. Check out the review sites (below) for more information and suggestions.

Essential Accessories

Rechargable Batteries

Many of the newer cameras come with rechargable lithium or NiMH batteries, but if yours doesn't, you'll need to invest in some rechargable batteries, as a digital camera will run though a set of four AA's in a few hours of shooting - quicker if you're using a lot of flash. I highly recommend getting at least two sets (I used three sets with my 950) of the NEXcell AA NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) batteries (I have a couple sets of AAA's for my Palm IIIx, too!). And check out the MAHA MH-204F quick (under two-hour) charger - get the set!

Larger CompactFlash memory card

The Coolpix 950 uses a Type 1 CompactFlash which now can be bought just about anywhere, though you may get the best prices online (see "Where to Buy" below). The camera comes with an eight megabyte card, but at normal (high) resolution, you'll only get about 20 shots at best on that. (Of course, at low resolution you could get a hundred or more shots on the supplied 8MB card, but why lose resolution when disk space is so cheap?) So get the biggest card you can afford. I've seen the 128 MB card for $50, and 256 MB cards are around $90. I've got a 256MB "primary" and a 48MB "backup" card which give me nearly 200 4 mega-pixel shots, enough for a heavy day's shooting. (Remember, since once you buy the card, "film" is free, so you may end up taking more shots than you used to!) Therefore, a single bigger card would be nice (so I wouldn't have to carry around a spare). A Type II card slot will allow the use of a microdrive offering a gigabyte or more of storage, but that's a LOT of pictures -- and the drive will eat up your batteries! Also, when going on extended trips I bring a laptop along so that I can download the day's shots each evening and use my cards over and over.

A USB or PCMCIA card reader

The Coolpix 950 comes with a serial cable, but downloading 48MB of pictures through that cable could take quite a while. Newer cameras come with a faster USB cable, but you're using precious battery life when downloading the shots. Since I have a laptop with a PCMCIA slot, I bought a CompactFlash-to-PCMCIA adapter (about $10) that the memory card slips in to. Then, when the PCMCIA card (with the CompactFlash memory card inside) is inserted into the machine it appears on the desktop looking like a disk. You can simply drag items off the CompactFlash "disk" and onto your hard disk for editing. If you don't have a PCMCIA slot but have a USB or serial port, you can get an external card reader for about $20.

A lot of disk space

I run my own website, and have over fifteen thousand full size pictures online now using over eight gigabytes of disk storage. I make separate directories of each event (you can see some of the public ones below) and I wrote some simple (GNU/Linux-based) software to allow people to view them at a size appropriate to their screen. This makes my life a lot easier, and the ownership of the camera even more rewarding. Most people (with more limited online resources) will need to carefully choose the pictures they want to display on their websites and crop and resize the pictures for easy downloading and viewing, as my wife Elaine does with her Road Sage site. But for archival purposes - because you don't want to throw away your original, high-quality photos - you'll want to burn CDs or save to Jaz, Zip, or other large capacity storage medium, as display - and print - mechanisms will only get better and cheaper.

A handy picture viewer/editor

For GNU/Linux, check out GQview, a free (GPL'd) GTK-based digital camera software package. On Mac or Windows, I've used ACDSee - the freeware version was great, but now they sell a version with even more features. There may be better ones now, see e.g. tucows for the best downloads. For more info, see my printing tips page.

A printer

There are quite a few very good printers under $200 that print near photo-quality. Hell, we print using our old HP Deskjet 712c (using Epson heavy-weight matte photo paper) and get excellent results. I'm not going to suggest a printer, but look at machines from Lexmark, Epson, HP and Cannon in the near $200 range.
As many people seem to be having difficulties obtaining quality results with their printers, despite the fact that their printer is usually capable of producing excellent results. I have created a separate printing tips page.

Camera Reviews (see also: Image Software and Printer Reviews)

Digital Photography Review
megapixel.net - a monthly still camera web magazine
Nikon Coolpix 4500
photo.net - excellent information to better your technique
Steve's Digicams
- Extensive user reviews - Excellent!!

Where to Buy

Comp-U-Plus - good prices and service - this is where I bought my camera
pricewatch.com - you might find better prices here.
Search for "coolpix 950" or "compactflash" (without the quotes)
Thomas Distributing - for batteries and chargers
CKC Power - lots of useful gadgets!