Byte Marks
Wanna be a digital shutterbug?

By Burt Lum

The minute you make the transition from film to digital cameras, the concept of film begins to change. As seen with text files (versus typewritten pages) or MP3s (versus vinyl records), once the medium changes from atoms to electrons, doors open to production, modification and replication. In general, electrons are much cheaper to deal with than atoms.

With digital photos, the limiting factor is not the film but memory and batteries. With my Canon S100 and 64MB compact flash memory, I could shoot pictures without worrying about running out of film. The 64MB compact flash card can handle more than 100 pix at medium resolution. I did find myself running out of battery power much faster than usual. Unlike with analog cameras, you are lucky if the battery charge on these new digital cameras lasts half the day with active shooting. I found myself thinking where my next charge was going to come from.

With digital camera in hand, you will have a lot more pictures than you know what to do with. On my recent trip to Japan, in a short span of four days I ended up with more than 200 photos. If it wasn't for running out of battery charge, I might have had a lot more.

The great thing with digital photos is once you've taken them, you can crop, enlarge and enhance each image. The bad thing about digital photos is you can crop, enlarge and enhance each image. That means going through each photo and crafting your perfect image.

Now that you have all those great shots all nicely cropped, you will need to create an online photo album to share. As previously covered here, there are many online photo services available, such as www.ofoto.com. Instead I tried a software package that I could load on my personal server. For the technically inclined, you can try Image Arcadia. You can also find a sample photo album of mine.

Enjoy. ;-)

Burt Lum, cyber-citizen and self-anointed tour guide to the Internet, is a click away at burt@brouhaha.net.