Digi-FAQ's

I have seen and been asked so many questions that I thought I would put together a little Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. I am in no way an expert when it comes to digital photography and some of these are based on my own experience and others are from discussions elsewhere on the web.

D/SLRs

My new digital camera has a 1.6 magnification factor, that means my 300mm lens becomes a 480mm lens

No. And Yes. The lens is a 300mm lens and nothing the camera does will change that. However, due to the smaller sensor size of most D/SLRs, the 300mm lens will have the same field of view as a 480mm lens. The object you're shooting will be the same size in the frame whether it is film or digital, but the frame is smaller on a digital, so it appears bigger.

What settings should I be using on my camera

Well it really depends on your style of shooting and how you like your pictures to look. The easiest thing to do is shoot RAW. That way things like White Balance, saturation, sharpening etc can be done in the digital darkroom. The only thing you need to worry about then is the ISO setting, shutter speed and aperture as these are the only things that cannot be changed after the picture is taken. Mmmm, same as film then :)

Digital Darkroom

There is no negative to create copies from.

Depends. If you shoot in RAW mode with your D/SLR. the image file created by the camera is in fact a "digital negative". This file needs to be converted into a TIFF file before any processing or printing can be done. This means that the RAW file will always be what came out of the camera.

Surely I can save my images on the computer hard disk.

Of course you can, and you will probably never have any problems whatsoever. BUT, there are gremlins out there that may just come round and bite you. Such as hard disk failure - modern hard disks are extremely robust and rarely go wrong, but they can and do. Or a power spike - the electricity supply to your house is not always a constant level. The power can go up or down and now again can "spike". This can cause damage to many different things inside your computer, but they can all be replaced. But, if the hard disk is damaged, you will struggle to get the data, including your images, off of it. See my page on Digital Storage for ideas to solve this problem.

But if I save them on a CD, that format might not be around in five years time.

Well I don't think that CD's are going anywhere soon. DVD's are quite common now, and fairly cheap, but CD's are still here and will be for some time. As new technology comes on the market, there will be a period of transition, giving you plenty of time to copy from your CD on to the new technology.

The more you copy an image the worse the picture gets.

Not true. A digital image is nothing more than a series of one's and zero's. Every time you copy the image, it is an exact copy of the original. This myth may stem from the format used to store the image. Jpeg format uses compression to make the file size as small as possible. If you open a jpeg file in an image program and then save it as another jpeg file, it will lose some quality. A TIFF file is a "lossless" format. No matter how many TIFF files you make from an image, it will not lose any quality at all. Of course, this means the file sizes are substantially larger than jpg's.