Sign up for Alex's free Technology Tailor Newsletter to receive articles and resources from The Technology Tailor Show on WGN Radio.
An Excerpt from GOING DIGITAL: The Introduction
By Alex L. Goldfayn The Technology Tailor
Published Jul 31, 2006 Chicago Tribune
The following is an excerpt from my first book, Going Digital, which ran in the Chicago Tribune. For more details on Going Digital, and additional excerpts, please visit the Going Digital Home Page.
Getting the full picture
Digital cameras and video recorders hold great promise, but many users don't get the most out of them
Editor's note: Alex L. Goldfayn, who writes the My Tech column for the Chicago Tribune, has written a book on how consumers can maximize their enjoyment of digital photography and video. Here is an excerpt from "Going Digital" (Collins, $12.95), which goes on sale Tuesday.
We crowded around the photos with our family less than an hour after we had returned from a two-week vacation in France.
There were about 850 shots, organized by city. Our family marveled and laughed with my wife and me as we told them the stories behind the beautiful images from Paris, Nice, Cannes, Entrevoux and the Principality of Monte Carlo.
There were photos of the prerequisite sights, the entertainment, and, yes, the fabulous food. (Our camera takes stunning up close portraits of dishes.)
How were the photos developed so quickly?
They weren't.
We weren't looking at them in a photo album. Or as printed snapshots. They were being displayed on our television, in 52-inch big-screen glory, as a photo slide show. The slide show played on a laptop, which was connected to the TV with a simple yellow component video cable.
Over the next few days, I reviewed the photos on my computer, cropped them to remove unwanted parts, slightly adjusted the colors, turned a few into black-and-white shots and narrowed the complete set down to about 300 of the best photographs. I copied them onto a CD-ROM and took them to Walgreens, but it could have been Wolf Camera, Wal-Mart or my local one-hour photo shop.
I popped the disc into the electronic kiosk and went through the prompts. I wanted one 4-by-6--inch print of each image on the disc. In an hour, my glossy snapshots were ready, produced by a high-end Fuji photo printer, the same one Walgreens uses to print photos from 35 mm film.
The cost? Nineteen cents per print at the time (I used a coupon from my Sunday newspaper), or about $65 with tax for 300 of our very best, computer-enhanced photos. That's equal to about 13 rolls of 24-exposure film at less than $5 per roll. But remember, we started with 850 shots. I picked the best ones, enhanced them, then printed them, a process that's impossible with film.
How did the photos look?
Spectacular.
The colors leapt off the paper. In our hands, they felt exactly like photos developed from film. That's because these photos were printed on the same paper, using the same chemistry as film photos. All this made my wife very happy, and she went to work on a photo album with the prints.
Satisfied but aware I had not yet hit the digital photography home run, I returned to the computer to create a DVD slide show, complete with professional-looking menus and background music. I categorized and subcategorized the photos into folders (think Paris sights, cuisine and nightlife) and selected music from our computer's MP3 library that matched.
Then, on the basis of my categories, the DVD program built the menu structure. The whole process took parts of one weekend, but the end result was an amazing gift to our family. They received DVDs, complete with opening scenes, menus and all 850 photos, which played as a slide show set to music.
Our family can run the show on their TV in automatic mode, which I had set to switch the photos every three seconds, or use their DVD player's remote control to move through the shots.
Each DVD also had the complete set of image files, which our recipients could copy onto their computers for editing, printing, and/or sharing.
Everything has changed
After a century of film-based photography, digital photography and video has fundamentally changed how we capture, share and store our memories, and it has all happened in the last few years.
And even though some people know about some of the possibilities, this new technology has come upon us so quickly that most people are simply scratching the surface of possibility, which, I've discovered, is only limited by your imagination.
In fact, for many digital camera users, the computer has replaced shoeboxes full of photographs in the closet.
Sure, you've probably e-mailed some of your photos to friends and family and printed some of them at home. But, mostly, the digital photos just sit there on your computer, if they even get there in the first place.
For most people, there is no physical thing more valuable or significant than their photos and home videos.
So you would simply assume that the technology industry would approach selling and marketing their photographic and home movie products in a manner that's consistent with our emotional attachment to our family photos and movies. But as you probably know from experience, that assumption would be incorrect.
Like computers, digital cameras are sold through a listing of highly technical, completely boring and difficult-to-understand specifications.
So are photo printers, scanners, digital video cameras and nearly every piece of technology that has to do with going digital in the photography and video world.
When buying a digital camera, you may hear this inspiring recital from the salesperson: "This is a 5 megapixel pro-sumer model with a 20x zoom, but only 2x is optical and 10x is digital. There's a 1.8-inch LCD, but it's usable for review only. It can also display histograms.
"There's a $50 rebate today, so the camera costs only $500. You'll need a 512 megabyte compact flash memory card too. Those are only $50. Would you like to purchase our 17-year service plan with this? We don't make a commission on those. Really."
Makes you want to open up your wallet, doesn't it?
Capturing the moment
This digital camera, or digital camcorder or photo printer or scanner, is for capturing, sharing and enjoying the moments of your life.
This technology will forever memorialize your vacations; birthday parties; weddings; family dinners; Christmas mornings; your grandchild's first steps, first ballet recital and a thousand other firsts; the funny things your dog, cat or goldfish does; and every other priceless memory you wish to crystallize with a photograph or home movie.
That's the magic of "Going Digital." It's about you. It's about your life and preserving your most precious moments.
My approach to going digital has little to do with the cold, boring technical specifications of technology, and everything to do with how to apply this fabulous technology to your life in meaningful, practical ways. It's about tailoring the technology to your unique, specific needs, just as a nice suit is tailored to the unique shape of your body.
Unfortunately, the technology industry itself offers precious little tailoring, or even explanations of how to apply their products to your objectives.
Fortunately, however, "Going Digital" will teach you the fabulous ways that digital photography and home movies can be integrated into your life.
And here's the best part: It's easy to go digital, and you probably already own much of the technology you'll need.
The Technology Tailor Newsletter
