GO INTO THE ENTIRELY NEW WORLD OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY!
With digital photography, you can modify your images with software to add effects and have more control over their quality. When you:
- Learn what gear you need to switch to digital photography.
- Recognize the features of computers and the variables that affect their performance for digital imaging.
- Discover how to upload a digital camera image to your computer.
- be able to output and process digital images.
- Recognize image editing applications and scanners.
- Know how to use your camera to capture excellent digital photos.
- Discover the foundational ideas of photographic composition.
- Learn about file types and image formats.
Lesson Structure
There are 11 lessons in this course:
- Introduction To Digital Technology
- How images are captured and stored
- categories of equipment & software
- scope of applications
- Equipment
- Getting started; deciding what you need
- CCD’s
- Image Sizes
- Raster Images
- Video Cards
- Colour depth
- Computer terminology etc.
- Digital Technology
- Colour
- resolution
- sensors (how technology enables digital images to be captured).
- Digital Cameras
- Image formation
- lenses
- camera stability
- one shot cameras
- Three shot cameras
- terminology (eg.DPI, DVD, Bit, EDO RAM, Plug In etc)
- Taking Photographs
- Principles of Photo Composition
- Creating effects
- Default Setting
- Compression of Data
- Dithering
- Halftones etc
- Scanners
- Techniques which can be used for digitally capturing images from film photographs
- or graphics
- Uploading Images
- How digital images can be transferred effectively from a camera (or scanner) onto another device (eg. a computer, video monitor, television set, etc).
- The Digital Darkroom
- Techniques that can be used to process digital photographs within a computer to achieve improved or changed images
- Compositing & Imaging
- Production & manipulation of images
- How digital photos can be manipulated and changed to produce altered images
- Special Effects
- Scope and nature of special effects that can be created with digital photographs
- Outputs & Applications
- Printers
- The Internet
- How and where digital photography can effectively be used.
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school’s tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
- Explain the purpose and characteristics of digital photography.
- Select appropriate equipment for use in digital photography
- Describe how technology makes it possible to capture digital photos.
- Choose a digital camera that is suitable for a given application by comparing various models.
- Manage the effects that are applied to a digital photo that you shoot.
- Explain the methods that can be utilised to digitally capture images from graphics or film photographs.
- Describe how to successfully transfer digital photographs from a camera (or scanner) to another device (eg. a computer, video monitor, television set, etc).
- Explain the methods that can be utilised to alter or improve digital photos after they have been taken.
- Describe the processes involved in editing digital photos to create altered images.
- Talk about the range and types of special effects that can be produced with digital images.
- Determine when and where digital photography may be used most effectively.
WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS COURSE
Here are just a few examples of what you may do:
- Look into the digital photo processing software that is available.
- Acquire publications on Photoshop and any other two software categories.
- Compare the many software choices you research.
- Make a list of everything you would need to buy a digital camera for if you wanted to do professional freelance photography (such as studio portraits and wedding photography)
- Identify five of your earlier attempts at photography that didn’t turn out as well as you’d hoped. With each of them, think about what you could have done to enhance the photo-taking process. If you had taken these photos with a digital camera rather than a film camera, think about the benefits that would have been available.
REQUIREMENTS FOR EQUIPMENT
Throughout the course, you will require access to a digital camera as well as a storage or output device of some sort.
This is necessary so that you can use a digital camera to capture some pictures and submit them as prints or digitised files. The bare minimum would be a cheap digital camera, a printer, and a 3.5-inch floppy disc. If you intend to buy a digital camera but haven’t made up your mind what to choose, it’s advised that you wait to do so until you’ve finished Lesson 3 and started Lesson 4. Also, it is advised that you seek their opinion on the type of camera that would best meet your requirements. It is also desirable but not necessary to have access to a suitable computer.
WHAT DIFFERS DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY FROM FILM PHOTOGRAPHY?
Digital and conventional photography are quite similar in many aspects and very different in others. Both have advantages, thus there will continue to be uses for both in the near future.
A well-known and highly developed technology that is extremely near to being perfected is conventional photography employing chemically photo-sensitive film.
Because it has been around for so long, is used so frequently, and had so much time, money, and effort put into its development, we know how to use it, how to get the most out of it, and how to maximise its lifespan.
On the other hand, digital photography is a very new and fundamentally distinct method that stores photos as digital (i.e., 2 digit or binary) codes. Digital codes are comparable to Morse code, to put it simply. An electrical pulse denotes one number or digit, whereas the absence of an electrical pulse denotes a second digit. We may, for instance, generate representations for the letters of the alphabet by mixing these pulses and absence of pulses into codes; this enables us to type language or text on a computer. We can build more complicated representations by combining these electrical “pulses” and “no pulses” (or “ones” and “zeroes”) in increasingly complex ways. They can include the colour and level of brightness or darkness in one particular area of a photograph. We can then produce a digital image by arranging a large number of these dots into a grid or array. (In essence, this is how digital photography operates!) The digital image array is frequently referred to as a “bitmap” since each dot is known as a pixel (PICTURE ELEMENT) and is represented by “bits” of data.
Which Trends Are There?
As photography advances, its imagery has caught up to that of more established silver halide-based photography. It is not yet apparent, however, if it will ever completely replace traditional photography due to its nature, especially in circumstances when extremely high resolution or detail is necessary. Recent technological advancements imply that digital will eventually replace analogue as our primary method of producing still photos. Yet, in the shorter term silver imaging systems will actually be cheaper to utilise in many applications.
Film
Since William Fox Talbot invented the negative/positive process in the first half of the nineteenth century, film photography, based on the light-sensitive silver compounds silver bromide, silver chloride, and silver iodide (known collectively as silver halides), has been a part of our culture. The majority of users now associate this system with 35 mm photography.
Available equipment has achieved a very high level of sophistication whilst also producing very high quality images. The shutter and aperture exposure control systems on film cameras, coordinated with a film speed (or sensitivity) system based on a straightforward geometric progression (the ISO system), allow the photographer to creatively increase or decrease depth of field, enhance or reduce movement, and operate in virtually any lighting conditions. The drawbacks of “old-style” photography are primarily the need for complex processing facilities, the time delays involved, and the need for long-term storage of produced photos. The Polaroid process offers an integrated media for shooting and processing, but it is costly and has few uses. Despite improvements in archival preservation, photochemical imaging is still easily harmed by commonplace dangers like dust and dampness. Producing a print from a negative entails replicating one analogue system to another analogous system while dealing with physical issues, like the ones stated before, that present ongoing challenges.
Digital
These mistakes are mostly avoided with digital photography. The ability of digital image storage media—typically magnetic or optical in nature, such as diskettes, CD ROMs, or hard disks—to withstand physical damage and frequently remain readable and/or repairable after being compromised is something that would render a film negative useless has long been demonstrated. For instance, CD scratches may typically be fixed. On an original film negative, a scratch usually spells disaster.
Apart from this, a digital code stays a code until it is interpreted into an analogue artefact by the use of hardware and software. Consequently, digital can be copied to digital directly. Reading the code is largely unaffected by physical factors which trouble analogue copying and this opens the way for simple, cheap archiving of digital imagery. Digital storage systems can even be arranged so that if data is lost through damage or equipment failure, the missing code can be reconstructed by analysis and comparison of the remaining pieces of data. In essence this means that the digital image you create today can be preserved with no loss or deterioration into the foreseeable future by simply copying the file to new media. With the exception of some very simple and relatively cheap cameras, many of the early problems of digital have been eliminated or have become largely irrelevant.
For instance, all digital cameras today—aside from the simplest—have picture sensors that can deliver a high enough resolution for, at the very least, postcard-size prints of acceptable quality. Digital cameras use sensors, which are analogue devices, to capture the image. Lesson 2 will cover sensors in more detail. It takes time to digitise the image and write the image data to memory. This implies that many digital cameras require a delay of at least ten seconds between each shot, making it impossible to take a rapid succession of pictures. For most individuals this offers no more trouble than waiting for the flash unit to recycle on a traditional camera if you were, for example, shooting in dull light. High level digital cameras now use quick memory buffers and new sensors to enable sequences of five or more photographs to be fired-off at once, which is ideal for professionals who require’motor-drive’ shots from their shooting equipment. This issue has been resolved in part by improvements in the speed at which a picture may be processed after being read from the sensor. These amenities are not free, and digital cameras continue to cost more than their analogue equivalents. This pricing difference is closing over time.
Importantly, the exposure systems of digital cameras are based on those of traditional cameras, and depending on their level of sophistication, they permit the same image adjustments as any typical film camera. With the exception of the most basic point-and-shoot digital cameras, every digital hardware includes the film speed, shutter, and aperture mechanisms of “old style” cameras. The scope of digital cameras is now comparable to that of 35 millimetre cameras. Hence, even while the quantity of options may appear overwhelming, picking a camera that is suited to your needs is simpler.
Compact “cards,” which are really just computer memory chips, are how digital cameras store their captured photos.
The most typical method of permanently storing photos taken with a digital camera is to “download” them from the camera’s memory card (the digital “film”) onto a computer hard disc. This therefore makes it possible to repeatedly use the camera memory card. High-quality photographs consume a lot of memory, ranging from 1 megabytes for compressed files to 8 megabytes or more for uncompressed files (see Lesson 3 – File formats, for more info). This seems excessive, especially considering that a lengthy word processor document (say, 30 to 60 pages) only weighs in about 100 to 200 kilobytes. This implies, however, that poorer quality photos (or smaller sized images) typically fall within the same file size range as the large word processor file. This means that even the humble (and ageing) floppy disc may store 1 compressed high-quality image or 2 to 4 smaller ones. In addition, very few recent-generation computers lack a CD rewritable/recordable drive or cannot be upgraded to one at a reasonable price. You can fit 85 photos, even with uncompressed images of 8 megabytes, on a single CD/R disc. It is efficient in any language.
LEARN MORE AND BE MENTORED BY A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER WITH THIS DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY COURSE
