More people are interested in digital photography these days, mainly because compact and digital SLR cameras are more affordable than ever. As a result, the interest in digital photography how-to’s and basics have increased steadily. In this article, we will look at the benefits of digital photography and its basics.
Because of digital cameras and the onset of digital photography, chemicals, films and dark rooms which are an integral part of film photography have become outmoded. It didn’t take long for traditional film photographers to realize that digital photography has a lot of benefits. These benefits include not having to buy films which aren’t reusable. With a digital camera, you only need to buy a memory card once, and when it’s full, you can remove some or all of the pictures and store it in a computer. Another benefit is the ability to edit the pictures using a photo editing software. You can easily remove niggling problems such as red eye, crop unwanted parts in a picture, and many others. You can’t do anything with a picture that is taken with film as easily as that. Finally, with a digital camera, you don’t have to own a dark room filled with chemicals, etc and your photograph is instantly “developed” and available.
Traditional film photographers also discovered that digital photography is not that different from film photography; the same fundamentals apply between the two.
How Digital Cameras Work
Digital cameras essentially work the same way as film cameras, the only major difference is how a digital camera converts and stores the image after its shot. In digital cameras, light hits a batch of charged coupling devices or CCD’s. These CCDs act as electronic sensors which send electrical impulses that correspond to the light that hits them. These impulses are then turned into a digital image and displayed on the camera’s LCD screen. These digital images are also stored on a memory card at the same time.
The more CCD’s a camera has, the more pixels, a.k.a. picture elements, an image can have, and the better the quality of the photo is.
Kinds of Digital Cameras
Digital cameras can be divided into two kinds: the compact digital camera, and the digital SLR (single lens reflector) camera. The digital SLR works like your old film cameras. You can change the lens of this kind of camera, and you can mount external flashes on it.
Most photographers prefer SLR cameras over compact digital cameras because of the quality and ability to manually control all settings.
SLR cameras, are heavier, more expensive, have larger sensors than typical compact point-and-shoot cameras, which mean they can perform better in low light, and are what many would consider to be just the type of camera for the serious photographer. In addition, if you become an SLR camera user, you will eventually find that you will need to invest more on extra lenses and flash components to cope up with your growing knowledge about capturing the best photographs.
Kinds of Lenses
There are a multitude of lenses available for digital SLR cameras and can be classified to include zoom lenses, prime lenses, macro lenses and special purpose lenses. Most lenses are designed for specific applications, such as macro’s, portraiture, landscapes etc, although you can get good all purpose lenses.
Pictures
Most digital cameras produce pictures in JPEG format. However, the better cameras allow storing of RAW image format. RAW image file is the data produced by the image sensor of the digital camera which has not yet been processed. It is often called as the digital version of a film camera’s negatives. It cannot be printed or edited as it is, but it contains all the data needed to produce an image.
