Digital Cameras:  Your Filmless Future

My brother came to visit last month and taking him to sightsee in New York opened my eyes to the future of photography. He brought his digital camera and took all of his souvenir photos with it, deleting on the spot any that he thought less than memorable. Digital camera have been around for a while, but what he did after he took the pictures was the real eye-opener for me.

My brother is not a designer, nor is he an artist, though he does have a  technical background. Each night he came home and spent an hour  using a software program on his laptop to edit the images. He cropped out the important areas and deleted the rest, he airbrushed out telephone lines and ugly distractions in the background, and   saved his images in .GIF or .JPG format on his computer's hard drive.  He then uploaded them to his web site...so his friends and our other family members could log on each evening, see his new pictures and experience his vacation with him--in almost real time. It was a fascinating experience of how technology is affecting our everyday lives.

Digital cameras have tremendous applications for communicators.  Organizations with small communication budgets can benefit especially. While a professional may take better pictures, any of us could take a digital camera to a company event or take candid shots around the office and produce useful shots with little more effort than  my brother used. You could take product photos for a catalog or show off your new lobby remodeling. You could incorporate images into executive presentations. Images are applied instantly to memory chips in the camera. Since there is no film to buy or develop, you can see instantly if you got the picture you wanted. By transferring the images to the computer electronically, you could have pictures on your Intranet or in a newsletter the same day you took them, or send
them to remote locations as an attachment to e-mail!

Prices for digital cameras are starting to come down. If you watch the auction sites on the Web, you can get some really good deals. Or you can find special prices from manufacturers and retailers by checking sites like PriceWatch (http://www.pricewatch.com/) on the web. I've seen good cameras for as little as $175, and the average price seems to be $350-500, depending on the special features you want.  Most digital cameras will hold 20 shots, though you can purchase extra memory and shoot more. As soon as you download the images
 to your computer, the camera is instantly ready to go again. If you'd like to know more or get other ideas about ways to use digital images in your work, take a look online at Chapter 1 of Digital Photography for Dummies  (http://www.idg.net).

 Kaye Vivian, ABC
 http://www.cloud9.net/~kvivian/

Copyright 1998 by Kaye Vivian ( kvivian@cloud9.net ). All rights reserved.
For permission to reprint, contact the author.

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