Digital Cameras

[Shooter]

I have an (old now) Olympus C-2100 Ultra Zoom camera, it's only a 2 mega pixel but my main attraction to the camera was the 10X optical zoom lense, also the image stabilzation. Anyone have a digital camera? What do you think of them?

[Keith Heitmann]

We're waiting for the better camera prices to drop even further. I see where you can now get a 3.1 megapixel camera around $114.

I don't take many pictures myself but my wife does, having been a journalism teacher for 17 years and she still does layout work on the school yearly calendar, etc.

[PUFF88]

i have two olympus digital cameras , a d-370 1.0 megapixel and a C-5050 5.0 megapixel. The latter i had for about a year now and like it a lot, prolly would have went for the new 8.0 megapixel or the canon digital rebel , but they were not out then. I like many of the features of it, and its takes some really great pics most of the time.

[taphilo]

Using a digital camera is like shooting slide film. Over and Underexposure is really easy to do. No great lattitude in capturing dynamic range yet (unless you go for the $1,000+ camera bodies).

Go to a camera shop that rents cameras and rent various digital ones a week at a time to test them out before committing to purchase. It will save you a lot of second guessing in the future when you do get a good one.

[Galland]

I use a Kodak DC215 (2mp) for utilitarian photos. All my "good stuff" is shot with 35mm film and fed into a dedicated slide and film scanner.

[Keith Heitmann]

The wife went ahead and bought a Fuji A330 3.2 megapixel camera back in the late fall. It's one of the ones recommended by Consumer Reports. She also ordered a cradle for it and some extra XD photo cards for it.

I've used it to take a few pictures and it's got a lot of functions, including the ability to take silent movies. It has a lot of features that take while to learn how to access through the buttons on the back.

With all the latest computers hooking the camera directly to the USB port makes moving images from the camera to the computer for editing and printing a snap. All newer computer have what they call "Pict Bridge technology" that allows you to hookup virtually any digital camera to it without the need for extra software.

The camera came with a few editing and album program CDs as well. It does a nice job.

I see that the A330 isn't advertised as much and in it's place is the A340 which looks the same but is a 4 mp camera. However a few places still have the A330 and the prices right now range from $119 to $149, which is less than we paid for ours.

My wife is particular about cameras. She used to teach journalism and dealt wth cameras all the time.

[taphilo]

There are variations on this method, and how recursively you go down in organizing items, but there are three basic ways to organize at the top level: date, subject (topic, function or what-ever), and a normalized database.

If you organize by date then you can easily locate items if you know the general time frame. "I received this in July of 2003" and if you named your directories 2003 / 07 / DD then you can quickly find anything for that date DD. however, this means if you receive 150 items over the year from company X then those items are scattered all over the file system and are hard to assemble unless you always prefixed the file name using the company. Requires more work to gather all into a single source to distribute.

If you organize by subject - the company itself - at the top level - then you can create the same hierarchy above with dates under the company and everything is located in a single structure - easy to locate and archive and distribute. You can then actually abstract one level above to have companies in folders of their own like vendors, suppliers, customers, government etc and repeat the subject structure under each one of those top levels. Thus the same structure exists in all and are easy to navigate. You can even easily write programs to view and find files within this structure and file system act like mini-database without it being a true database. (This is what I do for my photographs, but organized at top level by year taken).

If you go and put things into a Normalized database (always the most efficient) you can then search the DB to find things - but it means ALWAYS requiring the program to put items into it AND to retrieve items for anyone who wants to find items. It also means programming to assemble and export documents from a single firm / time / subject to be distributable.

A Non normalized method of locating items would be to use and Excel spreadsheet to store information about where the files are located then sort that XLS file to group items then locate them. An XLS file (worksheet) has a 64,000 row limit. The XLS file would then point to the directories where the file is stored plus now you can have comments on the files to be metadata about the file. You then search the spreadsheet to find the file and from it you can then locate the file in the storage system.

Each method has advantages and disadvantages and once down a path it may require lots of work to change to a new structure. If anything, pick a method that allows it to be easily changed in the future.

Tom
www.taphilo.com