MIDDLEBURGH

Middleburgh Rides Tic-Tac Wave

A Checklist for a Specific Digital Camera Owner

1. Read the user manual (I confess I still haven't got past page 50). In particular the bit about "burst" where one click automatically takes half a dozen pictures - Great for action shots and avatar creation (see later)
2. Buy an extra battery. The assumption is that your storage media will be big enough for 1000 high resolution shots and it will be your battery that fails at the critical moment !!
3. Be Paparazzi!! - Take pictures anywhere and everywhere; Cultivate right place and time skills. Saw this from bus; Got off, and went back; You won't see may of these between Passage West and Carrigaline !!
4. Examine your pictures minutely and don't be afraid to use software tools like Picassa and Photoshop to select and enhance bits of a photo : It may be that the parts are greater than the whole !! ie 95% of your photo may be crap but like an uncut diamond there may be spectacular gem within. compare for example this astounding boring toilet shot!! Notice the moth on the panel and compare to the enlargement.
5. Get a copy of Image comparer:If you take bursts or do lots of image enhancement you may end up with a trillion duplicates and variants of same photo; Managing them can be a real pain; Comparer lets you weed out and discard the also rans (this is one of the few software applications I have felt compelled to buy!!)
6. Practice good housekeeping and back up using different media; I still regret losing some (ir)replaceable photos of Venice and the one of the woman taking her bird for a walk down a Hong Kong Street. It's not uncommon to see old men out airing their finches. In this case however it was a parrot the size of a small Roc. She didn't have a wooden leg or eye patch - neither did the woman!! I am also guttedn about a lost photo taken the day after the budget was announced in Hong kong 2 years ago. Obese guy in dirty teashirt, mouth open, fast asleep, sprawled in a chair next to a news stand under a poster proclaiming "Shock HK Budget".
7. Be Thematic - Although I have 27 posts on my photoblog" and 384 photos on my flickr account, 4 items draw 95% of visitors
   - The Lions of Hong Kong
   - holiday snaps from Northern cyprus -
   - holiday snaps from Istanbul
   - scanned postcards etc about 14th Hussars
   which is a bit of a disappointment because I think some of the other shots especially the wildlife are not to bad. (OK ...so perhaps the rest ARE rubbish !!)
8. Experiment: once upon a time this platform allowed users to put up animated gifs (avatars) on their profile page. Unfortunately no more !! But they are great fun to create !!. The following were were generated as follows:- took short video clips and using Windows Movie Maker cut out all but the action bits- typically less than a second then captture up to 9 frames andd load into Gifup to create your avatar

   

   Of course if you can get better quality using still pictures taken using a burst function and using different software tools

   
9. Don't be frightened of the video options (unless of course you are in front of the camera) Tools like Movie Maker let you expunge the really silly bits (or leave them in). The trick is to edit the clips down and compress them sufficiently to upload to a service provider without either compromising quality or dying of old age waiting whilst file uploads. eg flickr supports a maximum of 90secs/150MG whereas Photobucket supports 10mins/100MG

10. Give credit where credit is due to those who inspire you .. like jelly muffin (?) and faceone-visual

Posted at 2/03/2009 08:29:00 pm by David Middleburgh   Permalink

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