Don’t send those enormous digital camera files by email!

One of the first things new digital camera owners want to do is start sharing their digital photos with friends and family. Of course, the easiest way to do that is by email. 

Often, the new digital camera owner will take their enormous multi-megapixel files straight from the camera and attach them to an email, sometimes sending it out to their entire address book. The unsuspecting recipient may not appreciate this, especially if their internet service provider puts a small limit on the size of email attachments they can receive. Many times, these large attachments will clog the recipient’s inbox, making it impossible for them to access their remaining mail.

There are two solutions to this:

The easiest is to simply scale copies your photos down to a reasonable size that will fit on most screens and take less time to download (using a photo editing software). It is easy to delete these smaller copies after emailing them. Users of Windows XP have a way to do this built right into the operating system, and many photo cataloging programs have a send email feature that will also resize copies of the pictures before sending them. .

Alternately, you could scale copies of the photos down and post them to a photo-sharing site or to a personal Web site. Posting photos to the Web is a better solution if you have many photos to send, or when you want to share the same group of photos with many different people. Most photo-sharing sites will automatically downsize very large images or offer a choice of sizes to the viewer. If you already have personal Web space (most internet service providers will give you a certain amount of free space for your own website), you will find lots of free or inexpensive software to build a Web photo gallery for you.

Now that you understand the basic light controls within a camera, you need to understand what exposure actually is. Proper exposure does not mean some magical light value or perfectly centered light meter needle. Proper exposure is whatever the photographer intended for the scene in question. If the photographer wanted to underexpose the scene so that much of the detail was lost in shadow, then that is proper exposure for that instance. The trick is to make sure that your exposures are always what you intended when you pressed the shutter button.

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Nearly all automatic cameras today have some sort of preprogrammed shooting modes. These are designed for specific situations such as action, landscapes, and portraits. If you know what these modes change about your camera settings you can use them to your advantage in many more situations than just the intended ones.

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Shutter speed is another control used to modify the amount of light that reaches the film/sensor. Shutter speed controls the amount of time the film/sensor is exposed to light. In addition to controlling light, the shutter speed also has the greatest effect on how motion is represented in the image.

Shutter Speed Basics

Shutter speed is one of the most basic important controls on a camera. Shutter speed controls the amount of time that your film, or digital sensor, is exposed to light, or is, in effect, open. Basically, the shutter determines what image is captured on your film. The shutter is a small plastic sheet that opens and closes to allow light onto the film or prevent light from reaching the film. The shutter is opened when you press the shutter release button on your camera to take a picture. The shutter speed determines how long the shutter remains open.

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Almost all automatic cameras today have some sort of preprogrammed shooting modes. These are designed for specific situations such as action, landscapes, and portraits. If you know what these modes change about your camera settings you can use them to your advantage in many more situations than just the intended ones.

Macro

Macro mode is an automatic setting mode where the camera is predisposed to use the large aperture to compensate for the DOF compression of close-up shooting. In this mode you can not set the exact aperture you want but you can lessen your chances of an out of focus close up subject by using this mode.

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