Have You Embraced the New Wave? - using digital cameras - Brief Article

In May of this year, my wife and I embarked on our first escorted tour, a two week grand excursion of four Hawaiian islands. Unlike our many previous trips by auto to scenic places on this continent, the Hawaiian tour placed a limit on the size, weight and number of bags we could carry. Now that required an enormous adjustment for two people who always had difficulty deciding what to take on a trip and invariably took everything! After all, isn't that what a large car trunk is for?

The dilemma for me was deciding what camera, lenses and tripod to take.

Those who have experienced escorted tours know that most shooting opportunities occur closer to the noon hour than at either end of the day when lighting is best. So I reasoned, why carry a heavy load of camera equipment if there will be little chance of taking salon competition slides?

Adobe Photoshop notwithstanding, there is just so much improvement that can be rendered with a computer.

Once this level of enlightenment was achieved, the choice became easy.

Embrace the new wave--use a digital camera! Not only are digital cameras small, they are light, most weighing in at close to one pound. Moreover, you can view each picture as it is taken. If you don't like what you see, cancel the picture and take another. There is no more worry about carrying enough film or having film fogged by an airport x-ray machine and the number of pictures you can take is limited only by how many memory cards you decide to buy. I carried two 8-megabyte and one 16-megabyte cards, enough camera memory for 96 high resolution pictures. My Macintosh laptop computer provided a means for storing as many images as I could take.

One of my cardinal rules, unbroken until this tour, was always use a tripod.

The need for a tripod had been unquestioned since I was taught how to use a camera in the early 1970's. However, in the interest of weight reduction on this singular occasion, I decided to leave the tripod at home. The digital camera has the equivalent speed of ASA 200 film. This, I reasoned, should yield sharp images when taken in sunlight and I would find some support to lean against for pictures taken in the shade. Besides, slightly soft images could be made sharper in the computer--a final resort to save a picture that should have been taken with the aid of a tripod in the first place!

Each night I would transfer (upload) pictures from the camera to the laptop computer. On days that provided many photo opportunities, I would sometimes transfer images three times a day. The 4-gigabyte capacity of the computer hard drive meant that virtually many thousands of pictures could be taken and stored. The result of this infinite supply of "film" was an unbridled frenzy to shoot everything. I was truly riding the crest of the new wave!

When in excess of 1200 pictures had been recorded, I realized that screening, sorting, editing (cropping and sharpening), assigning titles and grouping the slides would be necessary, a daunting task that later required about 20 hours. The pictures were grouped by subject and placed into "folders" and each folder given a name. Several folders containing pictures for a specific island were placed together in a folder that was assigned the name of that island. Ultimately, the four folders for the Hawaiian islands visited, each with many sub-folders, were recorded on a CD-ROM. A copy of the CD was mailed to my brother and to each of my three sons so they and their families could enjoy the beauty of the Hawaiian islands. All this was made possible by embracing the new wave. ALOHA!

COPYRIGHT 1999 Photographic Society of America, Inc.
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