Digital Photography
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Why digital?
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Take a picture and look at it on the spot. Not
happy? Simply trash and retake.
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Professional quality photos can be created on
strictly auto settings.
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Never buy film again. Pictures are stored on
memory cards that can be erased and reused. After you’ve looked at
your pictures, print only the ones you want.
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Instantly download your photos to a computer
without scanning.
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With a digital photo, you can use image-editing
software to touch up your pictures, correcting such problems as
contrast and color balance when necessary.
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Unlike traditional photographic prints, the
quality of digital image files does not deteriorate over time.
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Digital photos are perfect for local Websites.
You can also send digital images to friends and family members by
e-mail, use them to create stationery or business cards, or put them
on such items as mugs or T-shirts.
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Eventually, all submissions to Gastronome
will be electronic.
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Buying a
digital camera and other issues
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If you are in the market for a digital camera,
get advice from salespeople and from friends who own digital cameras.
Also, read reviews about the many choices available, both for cameras
and for peripherals you will need.
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Resolution is a big item to consider in selecting
a digital camera. It is the intended end use of an image which
determines the required resolution, and to be assured you have photos
of a high enough resolution for use in Gastronome, you’ll need
at least a 3.2 megapixel camera.
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Becoming a digital photographer involves learning
new concepts and skills. While a digital camera may look like a film
camera, all digital cameras include computer-like components.
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Batteries are an issue because digital cameras
use up battery power quickly. Know the type of batteries required for
your camera and always carry a good supply with you. Alternately, use
rechargeable batteries and a battery charger (charge the batteries
right before use as the charge runs down dramatically with each
passing day).A rechargeable long-lasting power pack you can clip to
your belt may offer the most advantages.
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Digital pictures take up lots of space on a hard
drive and give files meaningless names like DSCN0022.JPG. It’s best to
rename each file immediately and organize them into appropriate
folders or albums.
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With digital photographs, you need an archiving
strategy. Ideally, you should backup new images onto a CD-R or RW disc
as soon as possible after downloading. Then you can delete the files
on your memory card and on your hard drive.
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Submitting
photos taken by a digital camera
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Supply only the photos for which you are
supplying captions (do not include any additional photos).
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Home printed photos are not acceptable. Obtain professionally printed photos (most
printed at home on laser or inkjet printers reproduce
poorly but this technology is improving), either from your local photo shop or from a company like Ofoto (visit their Website at www.ofoto.com to see what services they
offer). We still need the highest possible quality print of all photos used in Gastronome
even when we work from the digital images themselves.
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Besides sending actual photos, you
must send
your digital photos on a floppy disk or CD-RW (not a CD-R). Unless you are experienced
at editing photos, send them to us “raw” from the camera. If
you do some editing yourself, work at an image resolution of 300dpi
(not 72).
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Do not crop photos digitally! This is very
important. Cropping will be done by the magazine's page designer.
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For submission, files should be saved as high resolution (300 dpi)
jpeg images. If not sending images "raw" from the camera and if you
wish to edit them, it is advisable to work on the images in tiff
format rather than jpeg, as each time you save a file as a jpeg, you
lose some data to compression. Resaving a previously saved jpeg
is always a bad idea for this reason (return to the original file
instead, change format to tiff, make your desired changes, and do your
final save in jpeg).
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It is important for our editors to be able to
match up your photos on disk with the captions you provide, so at the
end of a caption, in parenthesis, indicate the number or the name of
the corresponding digital picture. There must
be an exact match between the hard copy caption numbers and the
caption numbers on the CD-RW.
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Place only one report on a CD-RW.
Questions? Please contact our
digital photo expert,
Gastronome Editor Cynthia H. Eisenmenger.
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