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Resolution

The amount of detail that a camera can capture is called the resolution, and it is measured in pixels. The more pixels a camera has, the more detail it can capture and the larger pictures can be without becoming blurry or “grainy.” High-end consumer cameras can capture over 12 million pixels. Some professional cameras support over 16 million pixels (megapixels), or 20 million pixels for large-format cameras. For comparison, it has been estimated that the quality of 35mm film is about 20 million pixels.

Exposure and Focus

Just as with film, a digital camera has to control the amount of light that reaches the sensor. The two components it uses to do this, the aperture and shutter speed, are also present on conventional cameras.

Aperture: The size of the opening in the camera. The aperture is automatic in most digital cameras, but some allow manual adjustment to give professionals and hobbyists more control over the final image.

Shutter speed: The amount of time that light can pass through the aperture. Unlike film, the light sensor in a digital camera can be reset electronically, so digital cameras have a digital shutter rather than a mechanical shutter.

These two aspects work together to capture the amount of light needed to make a good image. In photographic terms, they set the exposure of the sensor.

In addition to controlling the amount of light, the camera has to adjust the lenses to control how the light is focused on the sensor. In general, the lenses on digital cameras are very similar to conventional camera lenses — some digital cameras can even use conventional lenses. Most use automatic focusing techniques.

The focal length, however, is one important difference between the lens of a digital camera and the lens of a 35mm camera. The focal length is the distance between the lens and the surface of the sensor. Sensors from different manufacturers vary widely in size, but in general they’re smaller than a piece of 35mm film. In order to project the image onto a smaller sensor, the focal length is shortened by the same proportion.

Focal length also determines the magnification, or zoom, when you look through the camera. In 35mm cameras, a 50mm lens gives a natural view of the subject. Increasing the focal length increases the magnification, and objects appear to get closer. The reverse happens when decreasing the focal length. A zoom lens is any lens that has an adjustable focal length, and digital cameras can have optical or digital zoom — some have both. Some cameras also have macro focusing capability, meaning that the camera can take pictures from very close to the subject.

Digital cameras have one of four types of lenses:

1) Fixed-focus, fixed-zoom lenses – These are the kinds of lenses on disposable and inexpensive film cameras — inexpensive and great for snapshots, but fairly limited.

2) Optical-zoom lenses with automatic focus – Similar to the lens on a video camcorder, these have “wide” and “telephoto” options and automatic focus. The camera may or may not support manual focus. These actually change the focal length of the lens rather than just magnifying the information that hits the sensor.

3) Digital-zoom lenses – With digital zoom, the camera takes pixels from the center of the image sensor and interpolates (alters) them to make a full-sized image. Depending on the resolution of the image and the sensor, this approach may create a grainy or fuzzy image. You can manually do the same thing with image processing software — simply snap a picture, cut out the center and magnify it.

4) Replaceable lens systems – These are similar to the replaceable lenses on a 35mm camera. Some digital cameras can use 35mm camera lenses.

Storage of Images

Most digital cameras have an LCD screen so you can view your picture right away. This is one of the great advantages of a digital camera — you get immediate feedback on what you capture. Of course, viewing the image on your camera would lose its charm if that’s all you could do. You want to be able to load the picture into your computer or send it directly to a printer. There are several ways to do this.

Although most of today’s cameras are capable of connecting through serial, parallel, SCSI, USB, or FireWire connections, they usually also use some sort of removable storage device. Digital cameras use a number of storage systems. These are like reusable, digital film, and they use a caddy or card reader to transfer the data to a computer. Many involve fixed or removable flash memory. Digital camera manufacturers often develop their own proprietary flash memory devices, including SmartMedia cards, CompactFlash cards and Memory Sticks. Other removable storage device include floppy disks, hard disks (external, or microdrives), and writeable CD’s and DVD’s.

Regardless of what type of storage they use, all digital cameras need lots of room for pictures. They usually store images in one of two formats — TIFF, which is uncompressed, and JPEG, which is compressed. Most cameras use the JPEG file format for storing pictures, and they sometimes offer quality settings (such as medium or high).

To make the most of their storage space, almost all digital cameras use some sort of additional data compression to make the files smaller. One compression routine takes advantage of patterns that repeat. The image can be reconstructed exactly as it was recorded, reducing the file size no more than 50%, often much less. Another compression routine called irrelevancy eliminates some of the more meaningless data, taking advantage of the fact that digital cameras record more information than the human eye can easily detect.

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In photography, exposure is the amount of light allowed to enter the camera, thereby making the image brighter or darker depending on the exposure time. If the shutter is open too long, the picture becomes overexposed, and far too bright. On the other hand, if the shutter is too quick, not enough light enters the camera, leaving the image dark and unusable. Clearly, the amount of exposure is an important part of photography.

Fortunately, modern digital cameras make this much easier. By using a light meter, digital cameras can automatically fine-tune an image’s exposure, resulting in better pictures.
However, while the camera can determine the relative brightness or darkness in a photograph, sometimes it does not produce the image you had in mind. Fortunately, many cameras provide several metering options to help take that perfect picture.

The majority of photographs use average metering. This method simply uses the whole image to determine the exposure time, resulting in consistent brightness values throughout the image. Most of today’s camera’s use a more advanced method that breaks up the image into several sections, determines the best exposure for each, and then recombines them, resulting in a more detailed image. Depending on the camera, this may also be known as evaluative, matrix, multi-zone, or honeycomb metering.

For pictures with a greater focus on a single subject, centre-weighted metering may be a better option. In this mode, the camera is most sensitive to the centre of the image, and so giving it the most “weight,” or importance. This method still leaves the surroundings visible, which can give a nice balance to the picture. It can also be used to capture a silhouetted subject, by working harder to properly expose appropriate area. This is the second most commonly used metering method.

In some cases, such as wildlife photography or extremely backlit subjects, spot metering is very useful. In this mode, the camera will only expose a very small section of the photograph, usually 5% or less of the image, ignoring the rest. For instance, spot lighting is excellent for photographing the moon, as it will ignore the darkness of the surrounding space, showing much more detail. Most cameras will automatically focus on the centre of the viewfinder; however some may allow you to adjust the focal point.

Finally, some cameras may offer a partial metering option, which is essentially spot metering over a larger area, around 10% to 15% of the image. Use partial metering when the edges of the image would badly affect the lighting of your subject.

Using this information, you should now know which option will work best for you.

 

 

 

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Today’s marketplace is crowded with smart and talented business owners. If you want to hook your business on to the fast track, your first step would be to increase the exposure of your business to the market. Let’s just agree that without exposure, your market wouldn’t even notice that you’re there among the other smart and talented business owners. So how is it possible to get yourself spotted? The answer is –

Be Remarkable!

Have you wonder how can you become remarkable?

Be A Sore Thumb

Sticking out like a sore thumb is one of the ways, just take a leaf out of William Hung’s book. He is definitely one hell of a sore thumb and everyone was scouring the Net just to find more video clips of him, be it spoofs or interviews. He was not expecting any fame from the American Idol but it did gather him the most popularity votes among the other misfits. I would say that his fame is fueled by his remarkability because most people have the habit of sharing the latest interesting news with their friends. His remarkability travelled by words of mouth and the media decided to feature him to boost their own rating. In the end, the man had enough exposure to shoot him to fame. He had received marriage proposals from strangers around the world, he was cast in a Hong Kong movie and he had his own music video with gorgeous babes dancing around him.

You would want that for your business, don’t you? Note: I am talking about the exposure.

So how can you add a touch of ‘remarkability’ to your business and be 100% sure that everyone will glance at your business at least once?

Here’s how one guy became remarkable in his own way:

The One Million Dollar Man

I can still remember a particular Monday night when my partners and I attended a networking session for online marketeers. The entire social event was a frenzy session of exchanging business cards with as many people as we can say ‘Hi’ to, but one man distinguished himself among the rest by handing out black-white copies of US$1,000,000. He went around giving out ‘cash’ freely and extending his well-wishes to everyone. You can expect everybody to welcome his ‘gifts’ with open arms. Best of all, they are cheaper than conventional business cards and yet they are more remarkable. In fact, they are so remarkable that I even see people willingly introduce their friends to him!

When you are remarkable, words about you will naturally spread and your amount of exposure becomes viral. The Million Dollar man has so much attention that he stood out among the rest of us, just like a sore thumb. People just had to see what was the buzz around him.

Another way of generating remarkability is to boost your presence in your market. In other words, your name should be synonymous with your targeted market.

Get A Bigger Slice Of The Mindshare Pie

In the past, businesses built this presence by buying advertisements spaces on the magazines, newspaper, billboards, etc. These media were deeply rooted in the daily life of consumers for they were the popular places where consumers look for solutions, education and entertainments. So, when they were facing some problems, they would turn to the advertising companies as they were the most prominent then – remember that the companies had been advertised in the major media. The media had helped companies to capture a large mindshare of their targeted market. The companies brand had become remarkable in the eyes of their market.

However, the mindshare landscape has started to change. More and more people are searching for their solutions, entertainment, alternative income, education and even groceries from the Internet. But our focus should be on the social networks such as Facebook which has over 66 millions of active users and online forums, or anywhere else where people seek for answers everyday. Instead of the companies using the media to spread their names, they used existing social network to do the same! Netizens who find the companies’ products to be interesting and remarkable will be very likely to spread the words to their friends. Likewise, their friends will introduce the same products to their own networks of friends.

This is also known as web 2.0 marketing, where buzzworthy news are spread like wildfire among groups of friends with similar interest. Every business owner would want this kind of viral exposure, it lends remarkability to their businesses.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 actually refers to the current trend of the Internet. It basically means the proliferation of user-generated contents, compared to contents from authoritative sources such as universities. The use of web 2.0 marketing is a very cost effective way to generate the remarkability for your business.

For example, when a company wants to sell high-end cameras, they can easily find their targeted market in online photography forums and social networking groups. They just need to create a buzz in those particular areas and will start seeing potential customers discussing about it in the forum. These potentials will multiply when the discussion is carried on into other forums too. In other words, instead of paying a huge cost to get your products in front of TV viewers, you can spend a tiny fraction of the same cost to create a buzz in web 2.0 and see how the exposure for your products grows!

The Internet has already become an integral part of modern life and it has garnered an even larger mindshare than conventional media. If you are serious about growing your business, there is no doubt that you should start to consider building your business presence on the Internet and be nothing less than ‘Remarkable’ in your targeted market.

In fact, these companies and organization have already done it and had seen great feedback:

Ogilvy & Mather – Used Facebook to promote the Motorola Q mobile phone last December. They said ‘much more money’ would be needed to achieve the same level of consumer awareness and interest using traditional media.

Mediaedge:cia – Used MSN Spaces to promote Canon digital SLR cameras. They said ‘The campaign exceeded expectations with over 3,030,000 comments in just two months’.

Paramount Pictures – Used Facebook and MySpace to promote the monster film, Cloverfield.

The buzz that these promotions had seen is a testimony to how low-cost advertising using Web 2.0 can deliver huge exposure to your targeted market and boost your online presence. You can start learning the ropes immediately by googling ‘Viral Marketing’ and ‘Social bookmarking’.

If you own a business and really want to distinguish yourself from everyone else, you have to be remarkable in your very own way. You can either stick out like a really sore thumb that attract attentions everyway you go – which is a good thing for business – or you can start building your online presence with web 2.0 and attract global attention right in your home sweet home. Which is a better way to gain exposure? You choose.

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