Subtitles of the Movie

You know it is truly amazing the speed at which digital cameras have been able to challenge the quality of film cameras lately. It was just five years ago you had to spend four thousand dollars to get a camera that would match film cameras in the quality of image. Today it has gotten to the point that a good digital camera in the thousand dollar range can beat the pants off a comparably priced film camera. The quality of the image nowadays is astounding; there is no grain, there are no dust or scratches to contend with, and when exposed correctly the color accuracy is usually pin-point perfect. Now digital cameras work in almost the exact same way as scanners work and that is the basic concepts being the same, light comes into the camera through the lens and instead of striking film, it strikes the CCD or CMOS center at the back of the camera body where they are stored on a storage chip and then you download it into the computer for printing. Now the images I am getting ready to show you were shot with a Nikon D100 digital camera with an effective pixel rating of six million pixels. The street price on this camera is about $1699 for the body only and I shot it with an eighteen thirty-five millimeter lens and thank you very much Boots Camera in Fresno for the loan of the camera for the afternoon. Let us take a look at our first image here, which is a simple photo of the outside of a brick office building and notice the detail. One of the things that jumps out at you is the detail in the brickwork here that is very, very clean; it's a very clean image all the way around. Now this was purposely underexposed, because I wanted to demonstrate something to you later about DMAX and these dark areas. But first, let us take a look at the details on this image, that is a hundred percent magnification and you still got very, very good detail. You have no grain at all in this image in the solid blue areas of the sky; it is just very, very clean. We are going to back this off and let us adjust the brightness so that I can demonstrate to you the clean image that this camera is able to produce. Our histogram shows us that indeed this shot was underexposed; we have light detail from the darker areas, this is pure black and this is pure white, and then all the areas in between will show you the different degradations of brightness. So we are going to make the adjustment and bring the bright areas up and that is the correct exposure for this particular shot. Alright, we have done that, now let us look a little closer, you will still see on casual glance that there just does not appear to be anything in this dark shaded area. Au contraire, now watch this, we are going to go to image - adjustments - levels, boost our gamma quite a bit, and look there, look at all the detail that is revealed in that formerly completely black area and we have all this detail up here, little bit of a color variation in the cement work under here, we got all the detail on the brickwork, and you do not see any horizontal banding which is an indication of video noise, very very clean image, and this is representative of what you will get with a good digital camera. So let's take a look at the next image that we have here which is just a simple flower, did this for detail as well and we are going to take this to a hundred percent magnification and just look at that, I mean that is a very, very clean image. Do the same thing with this image, take a look at the dark areas and nothing is showing, nothing that I can see anyhow. We will magnify this just a little bit more, we will increase the gamma and this is not noise; this is just residual imaging from, say leaves that were in the interior portion of the plant. But that is a very good image, very good image indeed. Now here's how to get the most out of your digital camera. If you have the adjustments for the ISO or what they used to call ASA, you want to get it at the lowest possible ISO setting and the highest possible resolution when you take your pictures in your digital camera. The highest resolution, the largest it will possibly take in either raw data or TIFF, do not save them as JPEG, save them as TIFF or raw data. Now again, the lowest possible film speed at fifty, one hundred, two hundred, this particular camera bottoms out at two hundred. But in any case, as low as your camera will go in the ISO setting and as high as the resolution, if you will shoot your pictures with that combination of settings on your digital camera, you have very, very good results on your digital shooting.