Digital Cameras

[Eamonn]

I never really got the photography bug. Over the years I have owned several fairly good cameras a good Pentax. I normally do carry a camera in the car with me.

A while back on an impulse I bought a Sony Cyber-shot 3.2 mega-pixels.

It isn't the greatest, but for what I use it for it does OK.

I e-mail a lot of photos to friends and family. If there are enough good pictures I transfer them to a disk and mail them, but it seems I don't print that many photos. I also use a Samsung compact camera with a small zoom.

I hope to take a lot of pictures of the Jamboree and plan to give each Scout a disk at the end. For the Sony I have 16 MB, memory card which came with the camera and I bought a 128MB along with 256MB card. I don't really know how pictures this lot will take. From what I can work out it seems to be around a little over 300.

The memory cards are not cheap. A 1GB Sony memory stick runs about $130.00 A 512MB is about $90.00.

Are there any tricks to getting more photos on a card without losing too much quality?

Also looking in the Campmor catalog they had a battery recharger that was solar powered.

Has anyone tried this? And does it work?

Eamonn.(This message has been edited by Eamonn)

[Trevorum]

I miss my digital camera. It burned up.

[frankj]

300 pictures seems like plenty. Will there be others taking pictures as well? Maybe you should think about pooling the images so the disk you ultimately produce contains the best of the best. The price you paid for the 512 sounds about right. I bought a 256 for $ 40 at costco, a discount retailer here on Leftist Coast. 512s were going for around $ 80.

 

With my 3.2 digital, I can get so many pictures on the 256K that it gets a little burdensome working through them all. One other thing I have learned in the switch from 35mm film to digital is the time-lag between pressing the shutter release and the actual recording of the image. With my film camera, what I see through the view finder is what I get. With my digital, what I see through the view finder is not necessarily what I get -- the subjects move between the moment you press the button and when the image is recorded. But you have probably also discovered this. The higher priced digitals don't have this drawback.

 

Have fun at Jamboree, 4 boys from our troop are going.

[madkins007]

Picture storage- You can now buy some devices that will store the pictures for you. iPods, for example can do that, as can laptops, etc.

 

More pictures on the card- just choose the right quality setting for your real needs (most of the time you really don't need the top end quality!) and do a 'daily data dump' of the bad shots.

 

Charger- Some digital cameras (especially the super light or thin ones) ONLY charge when in their charging stand- the charging port on the side just runs it for shooting or transferring photos, but not recharging the battery. Check yours before you go to know if you need the charger base or not.

 

Solar Charger- Solar chargers work great for smaller batteries and can take nearly forever for bigger batteries. If your camera uses 'regualr rechargeable batteries', this option should work well for you- you can pop a set in the charger, let'em charge for a day (or however long they'll take), swap and charge the next set.

[SWScouter]

For charging batteries, I bought a cheap inverter for $15 at Fry's Electronics. If you have access to a vehicle, you can plug any of your chargers (cell phone, camera, camcorder) in it and charge them up. It works great.

 

You may see if anyone you know at Jamboree will have a laptop with a CD burner on it. That way, just get a cardreader to plug your card in the laptop and burn the pictures to CD, then you can clear the card and start over.

 

SWScouter

[packsaddle]

I just take spare batteries. Depending on the camera, turning off the screen and merely using the viewfinder can greatly increase battery life. Also I try not to use the flash unless necessary. I have a full version of Photoshop to tweak everything on the final photos I think are worth keeping.

 

I sympathize with the numbers thing. Using film I was quite judicious about choosing a shot, composing the frame, etc. Like the photography MB discusses. But now, I just burn digits on the card and then dump the junk later.

 

Regarding the latency of the shutter, some cameras are quite slow (I have one of these, an old Nikon) and others are almost identical to the SLR film cameras in shutter speed and features, fully automatic to fully manual settings. Depends on the model you have.

[Eamonn]

Thanks for the help.

While I do have a lot of friends who will be working as staff members at the Jambo. I think everyone and their brother will be asking them to recharge something, I'm thinking cell phones, lap-tops,batteries and shavers. I really don't want to be a pest!! That's why I was looking at the solar recharger.I have several recharger's that work well at home or in my car, but of course I won't have my car and I'm not at home.

Think I will order the solar one and try it before we go just to see how it works or doesn't work.

I'm unsure what cameras everyone else is taking, I don't think many of the Scouts have digital cameras and I think they will have the same problems that I'm looking at.

Our Jambo Commissioner, also serves as our Council Commissioner, so I did think of bringing a lap-top and dumping the card while he keeps the computer in a safe place. He is a super nice Fellow.

I do agree that I now seem to take more shots, than I did when I was paying for film and developing and they are no where near as good.

I'm hoping that I get one shot that is good enough to send in to the Scouting Magazine competition!! But that might be wishful thinking.

Eamonn.

[scoutldr]

I have a friend who takes annual vacations to Africa and is a semipro photographer. He takes several multi-gigabite cards. He tells me that taking pictures in "raw" format lets him get many more shots per card. Don't ask me what that means...

[Eamonn]

I feel sure that I will be dressed.

I don't care how many extra shots!!

Eamonn.

(With tongue in cheek or is that check?)

[KoreaScouter]

I too have a Sony, a DCS-75 3.2 megapixel -- got it several years ago, and am really satisfied with picture quality, video capability, etc. At the highest resolution and on optical zoom, the 3.2 looks great up to an 8X10 print. If you zoom a lot farther, or need larger prints, get a higher-res camera. I don't like the little jog/shuttle five position multi-button on the back though -- common on Sony cameras and just too small for my big stupid thumb to operate smoothly.

 

I use 64MB sticks, and get 40 pictures on a stick at the highest resolution. So, you should get 80 on a 128, 160 on a 256, etc.

 

As far as shutter lag is concerned, I've found that if I press the button halfway down when I'm framing the shot, the rangefinder will do it's thing, then when the shot's ready, push the button the rest of the way, and the shutter will fire immediately.

 

I'll never go back to film...

 

KS

[Prairie_Scouter]

Eamonn,

 

2 things to think about.

Batteries and storage.

 

You'll either have to take along extra batteries or find a way to charge the one you've got. The solar powered chargers are supposed to work ok (assuming it's sunny, of course ), and car converter will work as well, but make sure the converter is a match with your charger, otherwise you could fry it.

 

 

Regards storage, you either download your card to some other storage medium, or you take multiple cards. I've bought both computer memory and camera storage from crucial.com, and they have very good prices as well as "not junk" merchandise.

 

You can increase capacity by changing the resolution on your pictures, and storing as jpeg rather than "raw" format. That's sort of a personal decision based on how you're going to use the pictures. If you know for a fact that you'll never enlarge the pictures very much, you can lower the resolution somewhat, and jpeg will be ok. If you think you might enlarge some pictures for prints larger than, say, 8x10, you need to stay at the hightest resolution of your camera. Remember that jpeg is what's known as a "lossy" format, that is, the compression of the image for jpeg does lose some picture data. This starts to come into play if you save the same image multiple times; each save will recompress the image, losing more data. Raw format is the camera's native storage format. It retains all of the picture data, as well as some control data that can be used later if you manipulate the images in something like Photoshop. You can't view a "raw" image directly. You have to use a converter to put it into some other standard format. The cameras usually come with this software, and many image correction programs, like Photoshop, have converters built-in.

 

Lastly, you can increase your picture capacity by just doing some "in camera" editing at the end of each day. If you throw away the shots that just didn't turn out, you can increase your capacity a bit.

[hops_scout]

E, what kind of batteries does your camera take?

 

 

Also, I have found that the 128 cards at Walmart right now are only 19.95 at least here in Waterloo:)

 

My camera is being stupid right now, so I may be without it this summer:( So I gotta figure something out.

[kenk]

I used to e-mail lots of pictures to the parents of my Cub Scout den. At some point I even started burning CDs.

 

I finally gave up and got an account on Smugmug.com, which is a picture uploading site that costs $30/year. They provide unlimited storage, but apparently limit the bandwidth - which is simply the number of hits per time on your site (not a problem if you're not running a public sales site). I can even order a CD that contains the pictures - as a kind of backup.

 

Now I take lots of pictures, then I upload the ones I like to my Smugmug.com page and parents can view them, download them, and even order prints. It saves me a lot of time and trouble and is much more convenient for the other boys' parents.

 

If you decide to sign up for their service I think you can get some kind of discount by entering my Smugmug site address: . You'll note that the scout and school pictures have a password - that is because they have pics of other people's kids.

[OneHour]

Eamonn, to get more photos on your memory stick if you can reduce down the resolution of the pix (ie. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960 [1Mpixel, 4"x6" print], 1600x1200 [2Mpixel, 5x7" print], 2048x1536 [3Mpixel, 5x7" print], 2240x1680 [4Mpixel, 8x10" print, etc.).

 

I usually use either 1600x1200 or 2048x1536, because 5x7" is all I print. By reducing the resolution, you'll be able to get more out of your limited disk space.

 

As for memory sticks, they should be that expensive for Sony's 512Mb. Generic SD or Compact Flash 512Mb should run about $35-$60, but your camera uses Memory sticks so ... it's about $10 more expensive that's all. I just picked up 512M SD card for my son's Canon 510 for $40 with $15 rebate ... I'm looking at $25 for 512M SD card. For your memory stick pro, you don't have to always use Sony. Lexar or Scandisk make great memory sticks as well. ScanDisk 256M memory stick goes for $34 and their 512M is about $57.

 

One place that you could go to find cheap prices is www.froogle.com (it's a subset of google.com)!

 

If your camera is the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-71, then it is capturing the images in JPEG. You are already at the lowest file format that camera can get.

 

 

Good luck.

 

1Hour

 

(This message has been edited by OneHour)

[evmori]

While cutting back on the resolution saves space it also results in not as good pictures. I think the best thing is to have 2-3 128mb memory cards handy. This gives you room for lots of pictures. Another idea is at the end of each day, go through all the shot you took that day & delete the lousy ones.

 

Ed Mori

Troop 1

1 Peter 4:10