Digital cams need large memory cards
Let’s hope everyone’s Christmas and Hannukah was full of way-cool technology. I know mine was, which made it a day full of installing batteries, reading manuals and downloading drivers.My wife surprised me with a digital Nikon SLR, which gave me an excuse to fire off a lot of photos and an excuse here to delve into digital photography and connections to computers.
My first discovery was that despite the hefty price, Nikon does not ship any memory cards with the camera. I had a small 128MB card already but my first stop was the Crucial web site (www.crucial.com), where I scoped out a 2GB card for less than $150.
(Time out for a flashback… I once paid $799 for 24K of memory and holding 2 gigs of memory in a small chip the size of a dime was truly awe-inspiring.) Anyway, inserting the card into the Nikon and setting the resolution to “medium” resulted in nearly 1,000 exposures being available. When it comes to photography I can’t fully explain what that means.
When I was in college training to be a photojournalist one of the main constraints was number of exposures available. Unless you went to an extended film back you were limited to 36 (or sometimes 72) exposures. That’s why photographers often carry many cameras…to have different lenses and more exposures available.
However having 1,000 photos available (and a motor drive) in a digital SLR really is an amazing thing. You can fire off 40 or 50 exposures of a single moment in time and not worry that you’ve missed the split second that matters.
Adding to this freedom is the LCD monitor on the back of the camera. During a quiet moment you can review the exposures you’ve made and weed out the obvious dogs. With a film camera you never knew what you had until you came out of the darkroom, smelling of Dektol or D-76.
So I wholeheartedly endorse adding a large memory card to a digital camera, especially if you take photography at all seriously.
When it comes to connecting your camera to your computer, I frankly wouldn’t bother. Yes, I upload my photos to my hard drive (and a backup copy to an online site and a backup of that to an external hard drive) but there’s no reason to muddle through the crappy software that comes with your camera.
Instead go to the store, or Crucial’s web site, and get a card reader. For less than $20 you can slide the reader into your USB port. Then when you want to transfer photos to your PC, you just eject the card from the camera and insert it into the reader. Both Windows and Apple computers will recognize the card as a hard drive. You just drag from one to the other and you’re done. No cables, no mess, no software.
It’s a much more elegant solution.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: If you’re looking for a great site to store and save photos, head to www.smugmug.com. I like the management and features of this site.
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and is computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email is jim@cyberdads.com
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home