Everyone knows the name Kodak and can identify it as the company that took cameras out of the hands of professionals and into the hands of everyday users. What you may not know is that Kodak is in financial trouble. Why? Because those everyday users are now turning to digital cameras, leaving film-based cameras gathering dust in the closet. As the largest producer of film-based cameras, and photographic film, Kodak finds itself losing great gobs of money.
However, digital cameras won’t save money if people don’t know how to use them. Below are pointers on how to use your digital camera, and take advantage of your Mac, too.
You need a computer
While there are some cameras which allow you to view your photos on a TV, in practice a digital camera is pretty worthless without a computer. The best computer to have is a Macintosh with a USB port, which covers everything Apple has made since the iMac.
It also helps if the camera you purchased comes with Macintosh-compatible software. Mac OS X 10.1, by the way, comes with software capable of downloading pictures directly from some cameras; you may not need to load a thing.
Learn the basics
Yes, you need to read the manual. Some of the cameras don’t even come with a printed manual; you’ll have to read an Acrobat file from the CD-ROM that came with the camera. Concentrate on finding all the controls and learning how to use them. Make sure you know how to load batteries, plug it into your computer, and turn it on and off.
Take particular note of buttons you don’t want to push. (I recently watched someone wonder aloud what one button did, so they pushed it — and watched their rechargeable battery fall into the Pacific Ocean.)
Generally speaking, the better the camera, the harder it is to operate the camera. Inexpensive digital cameras rarely support more than “point and shoot:” you point it, you push the button, it takes a picture. The camera will try to auto-focus the image and adjust the exposure according to available light.
More expensive digital cameras allow you to manually adjust focus, focal length, lighting, and countless other settings to help you turn a good picture into a really bad picture — if you don’t read the manual.
