Go Digital?

by Alistair Scott


Picture this. Travelling in Switzerland you come across a traditional festival of 'Lutte' (wrestling). It looks like a Swiss version of Japanese sumo, except the contestants are somewhat slimmer and are wearing baggy hessian shorts and white shirts. Supporters, dressed in national costume, are ringing cowbells and quaffing copious quantities of beer, all in a surrounding of picturesque chalets and distant snow-capped mountains.

It is perfect for a travel piece. You take out your notebook and begin to scribble.

But can you capture every nuance in your notes - the shade of the sky, the spray of the sand in the wrestling ring, the expression on that Swiss farmer's face?

Why not use a digital camera as a notebook? Their price is plummeting, and with one you can instantly and effortlessly refer to the scenes you have just witnessed. On top of that, a digital camera can also provide you with the illustrations for your piece.

They have many other advantages for a writer. For example:

 • No need to take notes from notice-boards in nature reserves, museums or historical sites. Just take a picture and read it later, at your leisure.

 • Digital pictures cost nothing, so you can experiment with unusual angles, lengthened exposure, motion blur or anything else. If it does not work you simply rub it out.

 • Digital pictures can be easily sent by e-mail. So, if you are submitting an article that way, you can submit your illustrations, too.

 • With a digital camera you can build up your own picture library quickly and simply.

 • In addition, many image manipulation programs allow you to attach descriptions and keywords to digital pictures. This makes a particular image easier to locate than one stashed in a box.

 • Digital images can be easily manipulated to improve such things as colour balance and exposure. On top of that, there are computer programs that will stitch together a series of digital photographs to produce panoramas. One such panorama of mine was used to illustrate an article in Poets & Writers Magazine.

So, if you now feel that a digital camera could be useful, what do you look for?

First – resolution. This is measured in ‘pixels’. A ‘pixel’ is one tiny element of a digital image. A million pixels is called a ‘megapixel (or ‘mp’). Up to a certain level, the higher the number the better the quality of the picture.

A good rule of thumb is: 1-megapixel cameras are toys, 2-megapixel cameras are just about adequate and 3-megapixel ones are the minimum resolution that a serious photographer would use.

You can go beyond this to 4-, 5- or even 6-megapixels. Should you bear the extra expense? Not necessarily. Unless you are a professional photographer, at these levels the resolution of the lens becomes the limiting factor.

The second consideration is the amount of memory. This equates to the number of pictures you can store. Digital cameras use a variety of memory media – cards and sticks. These come in different sizes, measured in megabytes (or Mb).

The traditional 3½-inch floppy disk has a capacity of 1.4Mb. The standard memory card provided with your camera is often 16Mb. Although this has over 11 times the capacity of a disk, it is not very big. Digital images consume a lot of space, especially at high resolutions. You can buy additional cards from 64Mb up to 1Gb (Gigabyte, a thousand megabytes)

The number of pictures you can store in a memory card depends upon their resolution. Most digital cameras give you the option of selecting several levels, and lower resolution images take up less space. But lower resolution pictures are also fuzzier. As a rough guide, a 64Mb memory card should store about 30 to 40 top quality shots from a 3-megapixel camera. If you are going on a long trip, buy a 256Mb card, or bigger. Better still, buy several. The cards can be easily removed from the camera, and they hold the pictures, even when taken out.

When you get back to your computer you connect up your camera with a cable (usually provided), ‘drag’ the picture files to your hard disk, erase them from the camera and you are ready to start snapping again.

Other features to look for are a matter of choice. A zoom can be useful. Optical zoom gives higher quality than digital zoom, so don’t be too impressed by massive digital zoom figures.

Disadvantages? Probably the biggest one is the fact that battery life can be very short. So, when you buy digital, go for one that runs on rechargeables, preferably a lithium-ion (Li-ion) type. Lithium-ion batteries do not suffer from the ‘memory effect’ that renders other types of rechargeable battery useless after six months. Another feature to look for in a camera is the ability to turn off the digital display and just use the optical viewfinder. Digital displays eat up battery power.

Another bane of digital cameras is ‘shutter lag’ This is the delay that occurs between your pressing the button and the picture being recorded. On most new digital cameras, this is no more than a second. This may not sound like much, but it can make a big difference. I have taken several shots of fast-moving action, only to find the picture empty when I view it. The action had moved on by the time the camera got working!

So, in some respects, cameras that use film are still better than digital ones – especially if you require top quality photographs. They are also more versatile than digital cameras, with interchangeable lenses and a much wider range of film speeds available.

But it is not a question of one or the other. It is a question of the right tool for the job. And for a writer, wishing to capture images for inspiration, to jog the memory, or incorporate into an article, a digital camera could be just right. Once you start to use one you’ll wonder how you managed without.


About the Author


Alistair Scott is a freelance writer/editor and Editor-in-Chief at StoryPlus ( www.storyplus.com ), an on-line children’s publishing company based in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has had articles, essays, fiction and poetry published and broadcast world-wide, and ten of his children’s books are to be published in June 2005 by the China Children’s Publishing House. He writes the monthly Markets Column for the European Edition of Worldwide Freelance Writer newsletter and is available for editorial work and manuscript critiquing. You can contact him at writer1@bluewin.ch

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