Digital Photography

Photography has seen a major change since the digital revolution came along and turned the photographic world upside down ! I can certanly remember many nights work to develop and print Photographs as a hobby - all very time consuming and ,well quite frankly -messy ! Now with the digital age upon us we can sit in comfort and view our efforts on a home PC just minutes after taking them.Photography has never been so easy or indeed so popular. To take a basic look at how it all comes together the enlarged view below shows the make up of a digital image,these squares which make up the image are called PIXELS.

In our old films we used there were grain particles which were light sensitive which could produce solid dots in layers after developing with chemicals - all that gone now and a Charge Coupled Device ( CCD ) basically a rectangular slab wich takes the place of the film frame in the camera.The number of these pixels manufactured on the ccd gives us the camera resolution, the more pixels the better the resolution and so on. There are many ways these little squares are handled by the camera after you have taken your picture with many confusing formats which attempt to compress the amount of information into a smaller file for quicker downloading or greater storage capacity , but be aware such files as JPG's are not as good as an uncompressed format. Check your camera settings to see if you can take images in RAW mode , use this for particular photos you are planning to enlarge or crop - it will take up more memory card space but after all- you did buy that camera because it takes good pictures !!