J. Kent Garman, M.D.
Committee on Electronic Media and Information Technology

igital photography has come a long way, even threatening to put film into the antique category. In this article, I will survey the essentials of choosing a digital camera, using digital images for presentations, storage and retrieval of digital images, the new world of online digital services and, at the end, the printing of your digital images (all in two pages!).

As to cameras, most modern digital cameras work well. Stick with newer cameras from major brand name companies, and you cannot go wrong. Cameras are ranked with megapixel (MP) ratings. This is simply a measure of the number of photoreceptor sites on your camera’s image sensor (think film). It ultimately determines the amount of data that your camera can capture. This becomes important when considering how large you want to make your resulting photos. A 3 MP camera is very adequate for Web site use or photos up to 8 x 10 inches. A 5 MP camera will allow you to print photos of up to 9 x 12 inches. And a 6 MP camera will produce good 11 x 14-inch photos. Getting more MP capacity than you really need simply costs more, slows up your picture storage time and takes up more memory space on the camera’s data card.

It is very important to try a camera to see whether there is a delay between the pressing of the shutter and the actual processing of the photograph. Early digital cameras had a significant annoying delay, which would cause pictures to be missed because of movement during the delay. Do not buy a camera that has such a delay. The shutter and picture acquisition should feel just like a film camera, basically instantaneous. A useful feature in high-end cameras is to be able to take a rapid series of photos. Also many newer, expensive cameras will actually allow video images to be captured.

Many cameras come with zoom lenses. The difference between optical and digital zoom is important. Optical zoom is accomplished with the lens, just like a film camera, which means that the resulting photo uses the entire image sensor in the camera and will use all the megapixels in the camera for the image. Digital zoom, on the other hand, simply crops the picture on the image sensor. The resulting photo will only use a portion of the image sensor’s megapixels, resulting in a lower-resolution photo.

Digital cameras come with some sort of removable memory storage card that allows you to plug this card directly into your computer or to use an adapter to send the pictures into your computer’s hard drive. Most cameras come with a small memory card (to keep the camera cost down). I recommend immediately purchasing a larger compatible card to increase picture capacity. Larger is better, as you will find out when traveling and taking a lot of pictures. Get a card with from 256 MB to 512 MB capacity, and carry the smaller card for a spare. Also get an extra battery if the battery is not a standard one.

Digital cameras can be divided into several categories (compacts, ultracompacts, high-end “prosumer” and single-lens reflex, or SLRs). Decide which features are important to you and how much you wish to spend. Do you want to be able to carry the camera in a shirt pocket? Do you want to be able to use your set of Nikon lenses on a digital SLR? Count on spending from $300 to $1,000 depending on the feature set you choose. One useful, recently updated Web site for research is <www.pcmag.com/cameras>.

Now that you have your images on your memory card, what should you do next? If your pictures are valuable to you, I highly recommend immediately copying all the images to a CD with a CD burner. Think of the resulting CD as your negatives. If your computer crashes or your hard drive dies, you still have the CD. Next, use one of the computer storage and display utilities. For the Macintosh, iPhoto is great (and free). For Windows, I prefer Photoshop Album. Both of these programs will allow storage, retrieval, manipulation, basic printing and display of your photographs.

The next step is to put your selected images on the Internet for family and friends. There are probably 10 services that accomplish this, but I prefer Kodak’s Ofoto <www.ofoto.com>. The service is free and has unlimited storage space if you use it regularly. It is very easy to allow others to view, download, order and print your photos. Interestingly the Mac program iPhoto can directly send images to Ofoto. You also can order a professionally printed and bound book of your photographs in different formats for a very reasonable price — a great Christmas present for grandparents. In my opinion, Ofoto (and other programs like it) is one of the greatest tools for a digital photographer since it allows your work to be seen and used by others.

Your digital images can easily be used in Powerpoint presentations. It is a simple matter to “Import From File” any photographed or scanned image. Once the image is placed into a Powerpoint “slide,” you can resize, crop and do other basic manipulations to the image. For that matter, the short movies that many digital cameras can take also can be imported.

Finally, a few words about generating actual large photographs from your images. The easiest way is to simply order them from Ofoto. You lose, however, the ability to manipulate and perfect the resulting photograph in the creative process when you rely on an online service or local store to generate your pictures. As a previous film photographer who spent many hours in a home darkroom using an enlarger and chemicals to produce photographs, I feel liberated with the ability to work digitally. You do need a good ink jet photo printer. The quality of these printers has increased amazingly, and the price continues to drop. You can get a very good photo ink jet printer now for $150 to $500. If you want to make large photographs (13 x 19 inches, for example) you need a large-format photo printer. These run from $500 to $1,500.

If you are going to do sophisticated creative work with your images, you need to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop or its less complicated cousin, Photoshop Elements. These programs have a steep learning curve best handled with one of the “Dummy” books on the subject. Once learned, though, you can do very creative work and produce ink jet photographs that cannot be distinguished from one from film.

If you have not already weaned yourself away from film and toward digital photography, I urge you to do so. You will thank me for the suggestion.

Editor’s Note: The mention of certain brand-name products is not intended to be construed as an endorsement by ASA and is essentially the personal preference of the author.

— D.R.B.

JJ. Kent Garman, M.D., is Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California.