Geoff Holden

These are the accompanying notes for my talk given to the St. John’s Linux Users Group on October 21st, 2004.

What you need

To get started in digital photography, there are a few things that you will need. (Some of which you may already have)

Camera (digital or film)

This one is pretty self-explanitory… You’re going to need some way of actually taking the pictures, so get yourself a camera, I suggest digital, and at least 3 mega pixels.

Scanner

If you plan on using a film camera, you’ll probably want a scanner to get the photos on to the computer. (Probably, because most photo processing labs will now offer to put all your photos on a CD when you get your film developed). The other benefit to having a scanner (even if you have a digital camera) is that you can scan in other people’a photos, or old photos that you can restore.

Tripod

A tripod is a pretty cheap investment (mine was $10 at Walmart) that can help you take better photos. When taking pictures in low-light, or without a flash, the camera may need a lot of exposure time. In these cases, the camera needs to be kept perfectly still, otherwise your picture will be blurred.

Memory Card

Most digital cameras come with a very limited amount of internal memory. This amount is never enough. Go get a big card, as big as you can afford. There is nothing worse than having to pass up a shot because your card is full, or having to delete photos to make space for new ones. Once you have a big memory card, set your camera to the highest resolution that it’s capable of, and leave it there. You can decrease the resolution on the computer later, but you can’t add in more. You never know what shot might turn ou really well.

Card Reader

You can read the photos off you digital camera just by connecting the camera to the computer using the (normally) supplied USB cable. But, most cameras only support USB 1.1, and are therefore pretty slow. The x-in-1 card readers are pretty inexpensive (mine was $30) and also give you the added benefit of being able to read the cards from friends cameras, etc.

Batteries

Digital Cameras can go through batteries pretty quickly. If your camera takes regular AA’s, get some high-capacity (>2000mAh) NiMh batteries and a charger. If your camera takes a special battery pack, get an extra one. You don’t want to get into a situation where you want to catch another shot, but you camera’s dead.

The Screen Savers had an article on Essential Digicam Accessories that covers these things as well.

Calibrating your Monitor

Calibrating your monitor is crucial if you plan on getting prints made of any of your photos. It’s even pretty important if you plan on keeping the photos in the digital domain, because it will help them look the same on different people’s computers.

The actual process is pretty straightforward. You adjust the lighting in the room, and change the settings on your monitor until a calibration image looks right. Instead of me going into the details here, I’m going to refer you to Norman Koren’s excellent article on the topic.

Learn your Camera

This point can’t be stressed enough. Take that little book that came with your camera, and read it. Play with your camera and all the settings. Take photos indoors, outdoors, low-light, backlit, etc. under different settings. Find out what works best where. As an example, I found my camera took really dark photos when indoors using the flash… things get a lot better when I lock the ISO speed at 200 in these conditions).

Take Good Pictures

The better your pictures begin, the better they will end up. (not always true, but it helps) Read a few pages on photography and learn how to set yourself up for better shots.

Using The Gimp

You can get The Gimp from http://www.gimp.org. After it’s installed, you may want to browse and/or bookmark the manual at http://docs.gimp.org. Go through the manual and find out what all the tools are, and what they do. As with the ‘Learn Your Camera’ heading above, knowing your tools is very important.

Once you get a feeling for using the Gimp, and you’d like to do some of the useful tasks I demonstrated, head on over to http://www.gimpguru.org. This site has a lot of tutorials and tips on how to do pretty much everything I demonstrated and more.