May 30, 2008

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?

Digital camera can be considered as one of the best new technology inventions. Due to its small size it can be taken anywhere and gives you the freedom to take as many photos as you like without worrying about developing them.

Some pluses about digital cameras are:
• Ability to see taken photo straight away
• Ability to delete unwanted photo straight away
• The cartridge holds more photos than a film
• Quicker to develop
• Can use just one cartridge instead of buying new film each time

Some minuses about digital cameras are:
• A photo can’t be restored if deleted by accident
• Can’t develop a photo yourself
• The photos are more likely to be stored electronically than printed out

List some of the ways that digital images can be stored transferred and manipulated using other communications technology.

Pictures are first loaded from camera to computer. Then they can be saved on CD/DVD/MP3/USB afterwards and pxted, emailed or shared online.
Photos can be also edited (e.g. cropped, enlarged, changed in colour etc) using photo shop computer programmes.

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.

When uploading photos on public websites it is important to consider confidentiality of people whose image is shared.
Some images can be copyrighted therefore can’t be used by general public.

Briefly discuss some of the ways that digital images could, or are, being used in occupational therapy practice.

• Capturing clients during social outings and special occasions for memos
• Recording housing 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

• Dropshot
• 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.

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