Date: September 7th, 2004

Presenter: Dahlia Cavazos

Topic: Photography Basics --
               Analog Concerns in the Digital World....

Meeting Summary:

So, you got a brand new digital camera for your birthday, and you're going to be the next Ansel Adams (or Bob Guccione) and make digital memories to record your dreams. Well, maybe.

Digital cameras are becoming more and more capable of replacing the traditional film camera, at the same time as the prices are coming down -- a typical stage of development for any consumer technology. Point and shoot, plug and play, point and click, upload, e-mail, and so on -- with all this digital convenience, it's important to remember that the world is still an analog place.

Just because the camera is digital now doesn't mean the basic principles of taking a picture have changed -- there are still things you need to know to take a good picture, no matter what type of camera is capturing the image.

The truth is, digital cameras are only tools, just like film cameras, and even though there are some differences in technique, the same basic principles apply.

At the September meeting, Dahlia Cavazos, who moonlights as a graphic designer when her duties as OMUG Vice President don't require all her time, helped us get a handle on the basics needed to get the best out of our new digital camera technology, elucidating the mysteries of composition, lighting and avoiding pitfalls like decapitation....

This meeting was a little different in focus than our usual fare. Rather than a solely computer- or Macintosh-related topic, we went "back to basics" -- reminding us that there is more to the digital world than just hardware and software. There's knowing what to do -- not just how to do it.

I was very interested to watch Dahlia explain that once you know how to take pictures with your digital camera, you still have to understand something about what kind of picture to take. Too often in the Macintosh environment, we get so tied up with the gee-wizardry that we forget that no tool will create something worthwhile by itself.

It rather reminds me of the early days of the Mac, when the concept of Desktop Publishing was first invented. Suddenly, anyone could have tools that would let you publish your own documents in ways that theretofore only professional printers could do. Everyone and his dog were producing their own, unique, high quality... ugly documents (me too, I blush to admit).

In the furor of the revolution in publishing, no one realized at first that although anyone could use the new tools, they had no training in what made a good publication. Eventually, the basic concepts of publication design and layout became more widely known, and the general quality level improved, but there was a while there when half the stuff one encountered made one wince.

I think Dahlia did an excellent job of giving her listeners some basic ideas of what to consider, and made those of us who hadn't already been aware of the problem realize that we needed to learn more. For those (on the other hand) who already had some experience or training in photography, I suspect it was a relief to realize that almost all of it carries over into the new technology.

 

Click on the image below to link to a PDF version of Dahlia's presentation. The photos have been converted to Black-&-White to keep the size of the file manageable: