HW: Digital cameras

This essay on "de-mystifying pixels"

The point of this homework is to gain some experience in acquiring photos with a digital camera, and getting them on to a web page.

You should do this exercise in pairs, both to have someone else to consult with, and to have a photographic subject! You may certainly work on it together. But please hand in your own images.

Take at least 20 pictures each, but I'd like you to select from these just three images::

• One of an outdoor scene,
• one of an indoor scene (use the flash),
• and one of a person.

You'll take photos, download them, look at them on a computer monitor and select the three you want.

You'll edit each of these, creating one "display" image (800 pixels wide or less), and one thumbnail for each image.

Assemble a web page in which you display the three thumbnails, and each of these links to the "display" image. Hand in the web page by e-mailing to your instructor.

Get a camera

You may use your own digital camera for any work for this class. ITS-media has several Nikon 5000 digital cameras available for check out. You may also use these for any of your projects in this class.

To check out a camera, contact ITS-media to schedule a time at x-7727. They're open (May term) 9.30-10.30am, and 1.00-4.00 pm. They'll get you oriented to the camera basics.

• How to use the Nikon P5000.

Set your camera to get the best images

See "Basic Digital Camera Shooting Techniqes"

Of course, the quality of your images depends to a large degree on your own visual sensibilities!.

To make sure your image has plenty of fat, happy pixels: There are two settings on your camera which determine the sharpness of your images, and the degree to which you can crop your images later on:

• "Resolution" - which is what we've called image size: this is the width and height in pixels of the image files that your camera creates. Even if your final image is going to be much smaller, having lots of pixels means you can potentially crop one detail out of a larger image, and still have enough pixels for a good image.
• Quality - almost all digital cameras save images in the jpeg format. (Some also offer an "uncompressed TIFF" mode which is not generally needed for creating web graphics). The jpeg quality can effect how sharp edges are in the resulting image. It's always easy to cut the image quality down in Photoshop later on (to save on file size) but very hard to improve photo quality over the original. Saving at a higher-than original quality setting will not magically restore edge sharpness, and the "sharpening" filter can only do so much. So, you should always take digital pictures at the highest possible quality setting.
  
  Sometimes high quality is called "low compression" or low quality is called "high compression".

	detail from a large, high-quality image
	detail from a smaller, lower-quality image

From Camera to Web

The camera stores images in jpeg format on a small memory card that pops in and out of the camera. When you pop the card out of the camera, you pop it in to a card reader which are integrated into many of the lab PCs. This device makes it look to the computer as if all the images on the card are on a drive, E:. Directions are beside the computers in the Schertz hallway, and also online at the documentation cited above.

You can use the Windows File Manager to drag + copy images from the card directly to your webspace.

Once your images are on the webserver, you can...

• go to any other lab computer,
• open and work with your images in Photoshop
• save and optimize a copy for use on a web page using Photoshops "File | Save for Web and Devices".

Turn it in

Assemble a page that displays your three thumbnails (linked to your display images), worry about whether it is also working for other people, and turn in (moodle) the URL to your page.

Typical DW publishing problem: In past terms we discovered that Dreamweaver usually makes those awkward "file:///..." links if the image you want to insert is in a folder above the web page you're editing. So make sure that images are in the same folder as your webpage, or lower down in a subfolder.