Taking A Look At Your Digital Camera.

Ever since you have adopted digital photography? Have you ever really look at what made up your camera? Let's do it now. :-)

At the heart of your digital camera, it sits the image sensor which is responsible to convert light to electrical signal for storage in your digital camera or to display on your LCD screen as the picture. The most popular image sensors nowadays are,

• Charge-coupled device (CCD) - although you are practicing digital photography with digital camera, CCD is actually an analog device. Although they might not be related, personally I just think it is amazing that we are using analog material for this digital art. (Do correct me if I misunderstand the meaning of analog here).

• Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOS) - due to this technology, your digital camera use less energy to operate. However, also due to same technology, the picture taken by a CMOS digital camera tends to be "noisier" than the CCD digital camera. I am not going into the details here because it can turn out to be a confusing lesson.

So, it depends on you of which kind of digital camera you are looking for. And looking at the current market trend, CCD image sensor is more popular than CMOS.

Just now we mentioned about storage in your digital camera right? And I believe a lot of you will think about JPEG (Joint Photography Expert Group). It is true that your pictures are being stored as JPEG file, then, is that all?

There are actually the TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) and RAW format. Unlike JPEG, TIFF and RAW files are uncompressed and they are more resemblance to what the camera sees.

By the way, JPEG files usually are compressed in a weak method and that is one of the reasons why the pictures created with TIFF and RAW files look better than the JPEG. With that being said, you probably understand now why people are aiming for digital SLR cameras for their photography hobby. :-)

Please understand my intention is not to put JPEG technology down. What I want to say is that you ought to think about upgrading to digital SLR camera whenever you have the chance.

And besides giving great quality pictures, what other benefits do digital SLR cameras offer?

Personally, I like the camera because of it challenges my skills as a photographer. It is a totally different experience compare to a compact digital camera. At least it is a lot heavier and it shutter sounds better. My friend once said that he even build up his arm muscle for carrying the SLR camera around. I wonder why he didn't use the neck strap.

And how can I forget the RAW format of the pictures? For the pictures you have taken in RAW, you can't print them out unless you process them with software. And that is when I can refine the pictures, remove the "impurities" and make them look better. I sometime do add some special effect to the pictures to make them look more unique. :-)

But I don't do that much because it eats a lot of my time (I am not so using the editing program actually. Hehe......).

I hope that you enjoy this quick tip and we will meet again. :-)

Until then, be happy and keep taking pictures. :-)

Have fun photographing,

Michael Wong. :-)