Technical description two

Tutorial Two: Digital Camera use and applications

“A new technology is rarely superior to an old one in every feature”. Briefly discuss this statement in relation to digital camera technology. What would you consider to be some of the pluses and minuses digital camera technology holds in relation to more traditional film based cameras? You don’t get the same quality with digital camera’s as the pictures are pixelated so u lose quality when zooming in or out and its harder to re-size photos.

List some of the ways that digital images can be stored transferred and manipulated using other communications technology. Photos from a digital camera are often transferred to a computer to be stored, and then saved to a CD, DVD, Mp3, USB etc. Photos can then be moved to other computers or other technologies, and photos can be changed using programmes such as photo shop, changing size, colours and different effects.

Given the prevalence of image capturing devices, and thinking about the issues discussed in tutorial one, consider what sort of ethical issues may arise with their use. As it is so easy to transfer pictures between different technological equipment, privacy issues arise quite frequently as they can be posted on the internet/online communities/ pxt to a friend without any consent from the person in the photo.

Briefly discuss some of the ways that digital images could, or are, being used in occupational therapy practice. To capture memories for clients if they have outings in the community, taking photos of houses and putting them on the computer to digitally look at modifications.

Provide a brief summary of the services offered by Flickr.com Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. Its members can share personal pictures and use organization tools, such as tagging and browsing photos by folksonomic means (wikipedia, 2008).

Name one other photo storage website which offers a service similar to Flickr.com Photobucket.

Explain what the difference is between a digital and an optical zoom Most cameras have both optical zoom and digital zoom. Optical zoom works just like a zoom lens on a film camera. The lens changes focal length and magnification as it is zoomed. Image quality stays high throughout the zoom range. Digital zoom simply crops the image to a smaller size, and then enlarges the cropped portion to fill the frame again. Digital zoom results in a significant loss of quality as is clear from the examples below. It's pretty much a last resort, and if you don't have it in camera, you can do a similar job using almost any image editing program.

Explain what is meant by the term mega pixel One of the main ways that manufacturers categorize their digital cameras is in terms of pixel count. What this is is the number of individual pixels that go into making each image. Today this number varies between 1 million (1 Megapixel) to around 14 million (14 Megapixels). A million pixels is abbreviated to MP, so a 1MP camera has 1 million pixels and a 3MP camera has 3 million pixels. Currently most popular consumer digital cameras have between 2MP and 5MP. A 3MP camera can make excellent 4"x6" prints and very good 5"x7" prints. If you intend to make lots of 8"x10" prints, then perhaps a 4MP or 5MP camera would be a better choice. Sometimes two numbers are given, total pixels and effective pixels. Total pixels count every pixel on the sensor surface. Usually the very edge pixels aren't used in the final image. Effective pixels are the number of pixels actually used in the image after the edge pixels have been dropped.