Say cheese, and take a big byte!

Smile! Say Cheese!

[ My Mug Shot ]

The camera captures the moment, but if it is a digital image it can just as quickly be lost, deleted, compressed and corrupted. Many snap shooters are longing for a return to film, when you could see and touch a negative.

My name is Jim Domke, and I've been taking photos for over 30 years. I have no longing to return to film and have discoverd that digital is a lot more fun! I started out shooting black and white for the school yearbook. It was fun, because I could be creative both in the taking and the printing.

I've gone on to be a staff photographer at the San Francisco Examiner, Philadelphia Inquirer and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. When the papers switched to color -- to please advertisers -- I was forced into shooting slides or sending out to a lab for prints, taking away from my creativity.

And with digital, I'm back in the darkroom. Hopefully, my blog at infopackets.com encourages you, my fellow shooter, to be creative!

And that brings up my first pet peeve: Why do they give a choice of file sizes on the camera? Get the best image possible! Everyone should save the largest picture file size as possible, and then play around with all the information in the computer. You can always improve upon the composition by cropping in. It just doesn't make any sense to take pictures that are ONLY big enough to make a 5x7 print. I also suggest saving the image using the RAW image file setting. Some say that when photos are saved in Jpg format, 20% of the data is immediately lost. I'll discuss more about RAW image files in the future.

Why does the camera maker even give photographers these choices? Taking pictures records a moment in time and photographers need to capture everything!

Save all the pixels you can get . . . (more to come!)

jgd 11-11