Getting Into Digital Photography

I am a mad keen photographer and have been since I was about 12 when I was given a Kodak Box Brownie camera; which was something like 44 years ago. Since the Box Brownie I have owned: a PENTAX Spotmatic II, PENTAX ME Super, PENTAX Program A, PENTAX Super A, and then a departure to a Nikon F801—which I never really liked—then back to a PENTAX Z-1.

The PENTAX Z-1 was basically the end of my film cameras. There was a long gap until I finally made the jump to digital with a Minolta 7i, followed by a Minolta A1, then a Sony R1. I still have the Minolta and the Sony but never use them. I went back to PENTAX with the K10D DSLR which I just recently updated to the amazing PENTAX K-7 DSLR.

I am in the computer industry and had about three computers in the house at the time so moving across to digital photography was somewhat easier for me than it has been for other film photographers I know. I was already very familiar with PhotoShop, Corel Paint, and Paint Shop Pro; and the finer points relating to editing raster images.

Whilst I had some reservations at the beginning I have no doubts now that digital photography is significantly more fun that film photography. There are lots of reasons for this, but a few that come quickly to mind are:

• There is no 12, 24, or 36 limitation on the number of frames you can take. A 14MP camera with a 4GB removable memory stick can take over 550 shots at the best JPG quality. Even when taking digital negatives (RAW) a 4GB stick will hold about 250 shots.
• You can adjust the ASA/ISO ('film' sensitivity) up and down with each or any shot, unlike with film where it is set for the whole roll.
• If you take digital negatives (RAW images) then you can play around with the exposure and white balance even after the picture has been taken.
• Cataloguing and storing digital photographs is so much better than trying to store film negatives or slides. Most good digital photo management tools allow you to add notes and comments to each picture, and you can sort and organise them in as many different ways as you like
• Going back and looking at 'old' digital pictures on a computer is significantly easier than any method I know of for doing the same with negatives or slides.

Anyway, enough for this post—the shorter the better.

I am using Word 2007 to author and post this entry so I should be able to set a word limit. I notice that this posting has 489 words to this point, which hardly seems possible when I look back, but presumably Word cannot be wrong about this. So maybe a 500 word maximum is a good limit.

Barry.