Taking good pictures, and things you need to know about digital photo.

First of all, you need a decent camera with a zoom len!

Taking pictures at a reunion

You need to focus on the people, and don't be distracted by the surroundings. Who cares about the grant chandelier in a fancy restaurant in Shanghai. Who cares about the priceless art hung on the wall of Helen's living room. Zoom in on the people. Also, very important, you need to keep the same eye level as your subjects. If they are sitting, you need to knee down.

Taking pictures of your kids

Don't use flash on your camera directly toward your subjects. If you have to, keep a distance from your subject and zoom in. Also, don't use the red eye reduction feature if your camera has one. It is impossible to capture a perfect smile with that red eye reduction on, which adds an annoying delay.

If you want to take a good portrait of your kids, the perfect time to do so is around noon on a sunny summer day. Your backyard is ok, but beach is better! You want their faces in the shade, and find a place where the reflected sun light from the ground lightens and warms up the shade on their faces. Also, find a good angle where the sun highlights their hair. Once you have all of that, take several shots. You will find at least one of them good enough for a 16x20 enlargement. If you have a SLR camera with manual control, you need to select the largest aperture to make the background fuzzy and out of focus. Most likely, you would also need to over expose your shots by 2 f-stops. Most decent "Point and Shoot" cameras have a portrait mode, use it. You can also use the flash light to fill the shade if their face appear to be too dark.

Digital photo

The things I like most dealing with digital photos are that you can adjust the brightness, the contrast, and the colors of your pictures. You can also remove the red eye completely. You don't have to have a digital camera to get the digital photos. Use your film camera, let the lab stores the pictures in digital form or scan them if you have a scanner. A good digital camera, like Nikon 990, costs $900 dollars. You get 3 mega pixels from it. If you use film and scan the picture, you get 3-5 times more pixels. A scanner costs only $200 dollars.

Now the format of the digital photos. A digital photo can be stored in a few different formats. Tiff format (.tif) is most likely uncompressed (there are compressed Tiff too). They are big in size. If you store pictures on CD-Rs, or you have a huge hard disk, use Tiff format. Jpeg format (.jpg) is a compressed format. Their are small in size, but lost some details during the compression. They are good for emails and postings on the web. Never email a tiff picture to your friends!

Now about the resolution and size of the digital photos. The only absolute property of a digital photo is it's size in pixels. A 1200x1600 pixel photo can have a viewing size of 4x6'' or a size larger than your computer monitor depending on the resolution (pixels per inch) YOU set for the photo. A computer screen is only capable of displaying 72 pixels per inch. To display a picture with a resolution higher than 72 pixles per inch is a waste, a waste of loading time and a waste of disk space! So, if you want to view a picture on computer with a viewing size about 4x6'', you need to cut down its number of pixels to (4x72)x(6x72) = 288 x 432, which is a lot smaller than its original size 1200x1600. How do you do that? You need some software, Adobe PhotoShop, Microsoft Photo Editor, just to name a few, which can do resize for you by performing interpolation and resampling. Make sure to set the resolution to 72 dpi first, and then select a size.

When comes to printing your picture on a inkjet printer, you need to maximize your resolution. If you want to print a 4x6 picture, you need to set the resolution to 266.6666, which gives you a picture of (1200/266.666)x(1600/266.666) = 4.5x6. A good software, like PhotoShop, will let you select a constrain when you resize your photo. In this case, you want to select the file size constrain which maximizes the resolution for you while keeping the total number of pixels unchanged.

That's enough for today. Smile! Ka-Cha!

Don't use your work email for personal use.

Reason 1. That follows a broader line of "do not mix work with pleasure". I assume writing email to your friends is sort of pleasure even though you have to defend yourself sometimes as hard as what Helen has just done. Besides, you don't what your system admin to back up all your email and later use them as evidence in court.

Reason 2. Giving your work email address to your friends is the number one reason how people lose contact with each other. When you jump ship, which we all do rather frequently these days, you will forget to send email address update to whose who are less important in your current social circle. However, life is a comedy (better than a tragedy), you all know that. It is whose less important people who will give you sweet memories of your old days when you need them in near future.

Reason 3. Work email is localized, which means normally you can only access the email system at work (or home through dialup).

So what is the solution. Simple, find a free web based email system. Too many to name. I picked Yahoo (I do not work for Yahoo. Nor do I own Yahoo stocks), so did many others.

Jamie