Outdoor Photography Tips: Equipment
Film or Digital
I am unabashedly an old film guy. I have tons of negatives to go with tons of prints. However, lately I too have succumbed to the digital revolution. There are many advantages to outdoor digital photography:
- I can take high volume of photos at no cost of processing
- I don't need a darkroom
- I can "see" my results immediately
- My memory cards are small eliminating the bulk of film
- I can "erase" my mistakes immediately.
Don't get me wrong, film is great. I still have an old Cannon 35 MM I have used for years. I have just come to enjoy doing great color work at the comfort of my computer instead of in a darkroom. And I don't miss the old smells either!
For the Ansel Adams in us, black and white can also be done with some good software. This was once my personal mainstay. Today I also try to bring the wonderful colors in nature to print.
Equipment
For my personal work I use a professional quality single lens reflex (SLR).
I have a couple of lenses to go with it and a bunch of compact disk cards up to 2.0 GB.
For me, this performs fine for the high quality work I attempt to do.
For just fun things around the campground I use a smaller fixed lens camera that is five megapixels and produces great snap shots. It is compact, light and strictly point and shoot. I can stick it in a pocket until I need it and then just take it out and shoot.
Unless you have a strong desire to get deep into photography, you don't need to spend a ton of money. The point and shoot type of camera is what we will be talking about thorough out this article.
Telephoto Shots
Most of the lightweight "point and shoot" cameras today have some telephoto and/or wide angle capability. This is fine for composing your picture and getting into the subject matter.
There are usually two types of telephoto, optical and digital. Optical is when the lens itself does the job. Digital is an electronic close up and is never quite as good as the optical.
Software
The software package that comes with your digital camera will usually do just fine for most peoples needs. I personally use Photoshop.
Its cousin, Photoshop Elements, is not very expensive and is a very powerful tool to process your prints with. It provides a high level of flexibility with the image and color control.
Like all good software you will need to learn how to use it to get maximum quality from your photos. It will work with all digital cameras.
With today's software you can correct color, crop a picture any way you want and print almost any size. You can even splice multiple photos together to create a panorama.
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