Fear of the dusty sensor

If you begin to notice dark specks in your photos when you’re using a digital SLR don’t become alarmed and wonder if you will need to shell out more money for a new camera. The problem is simply dust on your sensor.

When you switch lenses on an SLR it is easy for dust to get inside the camera and settle on the sensor, which will, in turn, create small dark spots in the pictures you take.

Your camera may already have a built-in sensor-dusting function, but most cameras will still require a careful manual cleaning.

Purchase a self-cleaning SLR.

Dust specks that collect on the camera sensor can create dark spots on your photographs. If you are unsure if you have this problem already you can enlarge your photographs or take a picture of a white wall.

There are currently two cameras which have a built in feature to clean the sensor, the E1 and Evolt E-300, manufactured by Olympus. Every time you turn the camera on or activate the filter, a Supersonic Wave Filter vibrates the sensor which shakes the dust off.

Included are adhesive strips which run along the sides of the sensor to collect the dust. From my experience the system works pretty well. It’s unfortunate that other manufacturers don’t offer something similar.

Once you actually start using your digital camera, you will undoubtedly find that digital pictures take up a lot of space on your computer. If you follow my first tip and end up taking thousands of pictures, you’ll either need to buy a gigantic hard drive or look into detachable storage options.

Personally I think that CD-ROMs are the best way to go. Blank CD-ROM disks are inexpensive and can be read by every computer made. These days most computers come with CD-RW drives for “burning” CD-ROMs; if you don’t have a machine with an internal CD-RW drive external drives are available.

CD-ROMs are also great for sharing your photos with family and friends: you can create a custom CD-ROM for your family showing where you went on your vacation, or for your friend with pictures of her wedding.

As long as the intended person has their own computer, they can take your pictures and print them out, make them into posters, create Web sites, and do many other things that they couldn’t do if you just sent snapshots.

Take your camera with you
This may seem obvious but it appears that it isn’t so: you can’t take a picture if you don’t have your camera. Therefore, if you purchase a digital camera — take it with you. Take it to work. Take it on trips. Take it when you go for a walk. Take it to visit relatives and friends.

Don’t set aside your digital camera for only “special occasions.” I’ve used my camera to photograph car wrecks (the guilty parties were not very happy, the innocent were delighted, the insurance companies were bemused).

Interesting clouds, strange flowers, patterns in fallen leaves, funny signs and bumper stickers, and a variety of other things I would never have “wasted” on film. Apart from batteries and electricity, digital cameras cost very little after the initial purchase.

So take pictures. A lot of pictures.

Creative compact cameras aren’t much larger than compact digital cameras, however they offer a good bit more user control. Typically the lenses are bigger, heavier, and of higher optical quality. You will also find that almost all creative compact cameras have the option of saving your images in RAW format, usually proprietary but sometimes in Adobe’s standard DNG format.

The standard JPEG format is convenient for uploading images to the Web, sharing with friends, or getting prints. Unfortunately you will usually find that a lot of shadow and highlight detail that was captured by the sensor can be lost with a standard JPEG.

Using the RAW format, the photographer has the opportunity to bring out that shadow or highlight detail in an image using an editing program on a personal computer (or letting a professional lab do it and make a really great print).

Unless you are prepared to spend an evening reading the manual and learning the settings I don’t recommend you buy one of these cameras. Otherwise your results will be the same as if you had used a simpler compact camera.

Practice, practice, practice

Since you are using a digital camera you have the ability to take lots of pictures without the cost of film developing and hopefully some of them will be great. The more photos you take the better your chances of having at least one turn out brilliantly.

I’ve seen the photos — all the photos – from professional photo shoots. Generally most of them range from bad to OK. Yet professional photographers recognize the premise behind taking lots of photos, and quite literally will take more photos than “normal” people.

Professionals use more angles, more types of lighting, and move around more. Most of their photos are unexceptional. But on occasion they hit something, and get a great photo.

Shoot lots of photos. The film is free.

Using traditional film cameras you were pretty much stuck with the results of your efforts. If your image is under or over exposed, that is simply too bad, there is nothing you can do about that now.

You are out of luck if you photographed your subjects indoors and the flash made everyone and everything too yellow. The great thing is, with a digital camera and Photoshop (or whichever photo editing software that came with your camera), you can make adjustments to those photos that didn’t turn out that well.

Correcting the exposure is undoubtedly the most common adjustment made to digital photos. You may have taken a photo that is a bit too dark or too light.

Small kids have some interesting facial features. They have cute button noses, big eyes and cherry lips. Experiment with different points of view.

Don’t be afraid to turn everything on its head to find the perfect way to express the moment. Take tons of pictures: Children change so quickly. Both in the long term and the short.

They are so dynamic and can offer you tons of amazing opportunities for great pictures and incredible headaches. With this said, you can use this to your advantage if you just take tons of pictures. If not, you can expect hours of frustration caused by just missing or rushing the perfect shot.

Normally our eyes compensate for lighting conditions with different color temperatures. A digital camera needs to find a reference point which represents white. It will then calculate all the other colors based on this white point. For instance, if a halogen light illuminates a white wall, the wall will have a yellow cast, while in fact it should be white.

So if the camera knows the wall is supposed to be white, it will then compensate all the other colors in the scene accordingly. Most digital cameras feature automatic white balance whereby the camera looks at the overall color of the image and calculates the best-fit white balance. However these systems are often fooled especially if the scene is dominated by one color, say green, or if there is no natural white present in the scene.

Most digital cameras also allow you to choose a white balance manually, typically sunlight, cloudy, fluorescent, incandescent etc. Prosumer and SLR digital cameras allow you to define your own white balance reference. Before making the actual shot, you can focus at an area in the scene which should be white or neutral gray, or at a white or gray target card. The camera will then use this reference when making the actual shot.