Itty Bitty Hooves

Picture This

June 29, 2007 on 8:50 am | In life, work |

If I had to name one piece of technology that I think has really made a huge impact on the way I do things, and that I would never want to have to go back to the old way of doing things again, besides my computer, I’d have to say it would be digital cameras. They haven’t been around all that long. It’s only been about six years or so since they really started to become commonplace, but what a difference. It’s hard to even remember having to ‘use up a roll’ of film, having to take the roll in to be developed and wait for the pictures, although towards the end of that ‘era’ it wasn’t so bad with the one-day development places around. Now though, you can even just take one picture and then download it to the computer and viola! There it is. No wasted film, and you can either save the picture to go and get it made into a hard copy for your photo album if you like, or just delete it. You can do so much more, so much easier too. Put pictures up on websites, share them with friends via email. All these things that we, or at least I, sort of take for granted now have only been around a short time.

I use a Kodak Easyshare camera. The one I use isn’t even made anymore. It’s obsolete. That happens pretty fast, doesn’t it? A friend of mine just got a new Kodak Easyshare though and it is even nicer than the one I own. Still, the old (2 year old) camera I have takes fantastic pictures and the program it came with that I put on my computer lets me crop parts of a picture, or adjust lighting, or fix red-eye, all kinds of things you couldn’t even dream of doing on an old film camera. I remember having to make sure the backgrounds were just the way I wanted them to be before taking a film shot, or that every piece of the subject matter was exactly where it should be. Whatever was in the view finder of the film camera was going to be on the final shot–period. Not anymore. If there’s something in the corner of a shot you don’t like–crop it out. If there’s a pole in the background of a shot that kind of clutters up the picture–take it out. Here’s a favorite shot of mine taken with my digital camera a year ago. I posted it a little while ago. It’s a picture of a beloved pet that passed away last year.

Don’t want hubby in the shot since he was just supposed to be there to get her attention, along with holding her big stick? And maybe bring the dog into the clear subject matter of the shot? Easy, just crop the part you want:

Don’t want that ugly post in the background? Easy, just take it out:

Now we have a fantastic keepsake picture of our beloved ‘Justice’ with no background clutter, or anything. We made a hard copy, as well as having a copy on line.

There are so many fantastic things you can do with digital photography that you couldn’t even imagine doing with film. Cropping images completely out of the backgrounds like this:

You can even take moving video pictures on most digital cameras. I’ve done several videos with mine. They are short though. I use a film program to edit them into longer segments. I’d love to get a real digital camcorder though. Think of all the fun I could have then.