Photosmastery

Happy new year everyone! I am so happy we are in 2008. This year there will be more Photoshop Video Tutorials and Digital Photography tips. The Vignetting Photoshop Video Tutorial has been very successful. I am very pleased with the traffic reaching this tutorial, over 5000 people have viewed the tutorial in over 75 nations. This is very impressive.

I would love to hear about people that are using the video tutorials from this web site. Some feedback would be much appreciated.

In the early days of digital photography, the only way to transfer images from the camera to a computer was with a cable. The interface was usually USB, but some early digicams used SCSI or Firewire connections as well. As reusable memory cards became popular, card readers appeared, allowing users to quickly move images from the card to their hard drive.

Surprisingly, even today, many digital photographers still transfer their images to their computer via a USB cable. Card readers are inexpensive, faster and more reliable, yet many digital camera users still haven’t acquired one.

1: Card readers offer speedy transfers

Undoubtedly, the biggest advantage to a card reader is speed. Images transfer at a rate several times that of a camera USB connection. Obviously, It is advantageous anytime you can shorten the image acquisition period. As memory cards increase in capacity and cameras offer greater pixel density, however, transfer speed becomes a major issue. My first digital camera only had 8MB of storage memory, and I felt it took a long time to transfer the images to my hard drive by USB cable. Today a single raw image could be twice that size. A card with thirty or forty images of that size would take an eternity to transfer by cable.

2: When reliability is a priority, choose a card reader

While speed is important, reliability is crucial. The problem with connecting a camera to your computer is that the camera has to be on all the time the transfer is being executed. If the battery dies during the transfer, the current transfer will be lost. Even worse, there is a danger that the memory card will be corrupted if the power goes down during a read. It’s true that many newer cameras have longer lasting batteries, but memory cards are also getting larger, so that might not be much help. Some camera manufacturers actually recommend that the camera be powered by an AC cord during the transfer, in order to alleviate any problem of the battery dying during the copy.

There are no power consumption worries with a card reader. Power comes directly from the USB or Firewire connection. Unless there is a major power outage or the computer crashes, the power to the card reader will remain stable.

3: Digital camera connections are plug and pray

Connecting a camera to the computer is fairly simple, but I have experienced many instances where the computer refused to recognize the camera. Rebooting the computer typically fixes the problem, but that is still an annoyance.

In contrast, card readers are generally found immediately by the computer. Plug the reader in, insert the memory card and you can start transferring your files.

4: Card readers allow you to walk away

Once you’ve begun a transfer, you are free to do other things. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Take a walk. Even go to bed for the night. You don’t have to “baby-sit” the file transfer process. I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving my digital camera unsupervised in the “on” mode for an extended length of time. Maybe I’m being too conservative, but leaving my camera on overnight just doesn’t seem wise. With a reader, there is no off or on. When your file transfer is completed, everything just waits until you return.

5: You are free to use your camera while your files transfer to the computer

If your camera is tied to your computer, transferring files, you obviously can’t be off shooting. In contrast, you can load a memory card into your reader, start a file transfer and then load a fresh card into the camera and continue making images. The ability to transfer pictures while you are off shooting new ones is yet another major advantage to a reader.

So what are you waiting for?

If you are serious about digital photography, I suggest you ditch that USB cable and get a good card reader. You’ll soon wonder how you ever got along without one!

Article Source: http://www.articlerich.com

Visit alphatracks.com for more digital photography articles. You can also subscribe by RSS feed. See Tom Bonner’s portfolio at adventuresindesign.com.

In a previous article on this site (What to do with all those digital pictures) I wrote about handling digital photos. Like myself, many folks take hundreds or thousands of photos and some organization is needed to know what pictures you’ve got, and where. That information was covered in detail.

After reading that article, a reader contacted me via my web site (thank you!) and asked about photo security. What happens if your computer hard drive crashes. Wouldn’t all the electronic photos be lost?

Consider following my plan if that’s a concern of yours.

All of my photos are categorized by month in a larger folder for the year, and those folders are in a picture directory on my computer. What I didn’t say in that earlier article is that the larger directory is regularly offloaded onto an external hard drive that I use for, among other things, backing up client data to separate it from the main computer storage, for additional security. That gives me one level of redundancy in keeping my digital photos safe.

I also make slide shows of all my stored photos, whether featuring a particular topic, or just as a photo time line for the year. In 2006 I had twelve photo folders, one for each month of the year. At the end of the year, I turn all of the photos that I wish to keep into a monthly slide show and those shows were burned onto CD’s, which are stored elsewhere from my computer.

So, now I’ve backed up my main computer picture files onto an external hard drive, and I’ve created slide shows of all of the previous years photos.

Then, when the slide shows are complete, I then burn all of the original pictures from that year onto a CD as .jpeg files, so that should I ever want a hard copy or use one of the digital photos again, I can get just the one photo. The slide show software captures the photos, making it impossible (almost) to get one shot from the slide show after it’s complete. Keeping all the photos as .jpeg’s means I can get an original when I want it. That’s another level of digital photo safe-keeping.

The reader also commented that if there were a catastrophe (house fire or some such) that my photos would be gone. Yup, I guess they would.

When I travel overnight, I usually take my external hard drive with me. I’m more concerned about a break-in and thieves taking my computer than I am about a house fire, and I heat with wood.

Folks that have thousands of paper photographs stored in boxes and drawers in their house face the same problem. Should they have a catastrophic house fire, their photo memories would be burned to ash.

Losing my home and everything in it (including my computer and CD’s with my family and business photos and files) to fire hasn’t been a worry for me. The question is, should it?

The reader’s question prompted me to look at alternate data storage, and I found some services. Interested in off-premise data storage? Just Google “data storage services” and have a look at the results.

My next article deals with how to make slide shows for your family to share by showing them on your computer screen or TV set. It’s entitled “Now that I’ve got my photos on my computer….”. Have a look for it, would you? Article Source: http://www.articlerich.com

willy.r has parlayed a passion for computers, the internet, and digital photography into diverse activities including his own web site that discusses web site building, creating digital slide shows, and crafting Ebooks. He can be contacted via that site: www.solid-gold-websites.com.