By Stephen Wright
Welcome to the digital age for all of us
retro gunners. As a shooter and serious amateur photographer
I feel I can present a succinct and pertinent guide to those
of you interested in this new and exciting arena in communications.
This is what made it scary and intimidating to me initially
but, just as in most things in life, it is doable and enjoyable
- just like shooting.
FIRST - Taking the picture: The most straightforward
way is to use a digital camera. But it is not the only way.
Digital cameras are fairly expensive but coming down in price.
A basic point and shoot will set you back $300-$500. Or you
can get the superb quality $1000 Nikon Coolpix. Either way
when you press the shutter the picture is recorded onto a
digital card of one type or another. The most common is a
compact flash card. You can take the picture at a variety
of 'quality' settings. The lowest quality allows more pictures
on a card before it is full but doesn't allow much enlargement
at the print stage. Also, a lower quality, or file size, is
perfect for emailing over the Web. Best for email is a file
size of 50 - 150 kilobytes. This permits rapid transfer of
a decent picture, but won't allow the receiver to make much
of a print due to the low quality. A larger file size allows
better and bigger prints that you can make on your home computer
and printer. Thus you must tell your digital camera what quality
setting to use before you take the picture. Read the directions.
SECOND - Printing: You must get the "negatives",
or files, into the computer so you can print. Generally you
have a cable that comes with your camera that will allow you
to download your files into the computer. However I find it
is faster and easier to use a compact flash card reader, e.g.
Zio card reader, which very quickly brings (imports) your
files onto the computer and pops them up onto your screen.
The Zio costs only $29.95! Then you choose which picture you
want to keep and can print them straight from here. Or you
save them onto the 'hard drive' (permanent memory). From here
you can transfer the files to a Cd-ROM for storing outside
of the computer or sending to someone else. That's what I
did for the pictures of this year's Indoor Pistol Championship.
Then you can keep your quality high as you need.
That's it in a nutshell. Other options for digital are you
can take your regular film based photos as usual and ask to
have them put onto a CD at your friendly local photo processor.
You bring that home, plug it into your computer, and make
prints, or email the picture files (the smallest files remember)
to friends and family.
A new method skips the computer altogether. This requires
that you have a printer that accepts the compact flash card
directly. This permits you to quickly make prints on the spot.
However you can't crop or change your picture before making
the print.
Additionally you can scan a regular print with your flatbed
scanner and email or make enlargements directly on your printer.
As you can see the possibilities are huge and I haven't even
covered film scanning yet. I presume most shooters spend their
$ on shooting and not on $1000 film scanners. However this
method expands the possibilities even more.