Tutorial Two: Digital Camera Use and Applications

"A new technology is rarely superior to an old one in every feature". This statement can be discussed in relation to digital camera technology. There are many pros and cons to the evolution of the film camera into the digital camera.

Pros:

• Allows easy distribution of images (via IT systems)
• Allows manipulation of images (could also be seen as a con)
• Ability to store large amount of information

Cons:

• Requires much more equipment, eg, cords, battery, electricity (to charge), memory card, computer and computer accessories (to upload photos, print etc)

The arrival of digital camera has brought with it many conveniences, but convenience often brings with it complex issues.

Some ways that digital images can be stored, transferred and manipulated are:

• Video cameras
• Laptops
• Camera phones
• CCTV
• Speed cameras
• Google Earth
• Hospital scanners (MRI,CT)

Many ethical issues arise given the prevalence of image capturing devices. Because most people are exposed to the above devices it makes it much easier for people to capture, store, transfer and manipulate images often without informed consent.

Digital images are used in occupation therapy to make things easier. Digital cameras are used to take site photos that are included in housing modifications, photos from digital cameras can be uploaded and posted on DHB or occupational therapy websites.

Flickr.com "is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular website for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository" (retrieved on 6 May 2009 from www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr).
Flickr allows you to edit your photos (crop or erase red eye etc), organise your photos, share your photos with the world, make things out of your photos (cards, photo books and framed prints). And it's FREE! (retrieved on 6 May 2009 from www.flickr.com).

Another photo storage website which offers a service similar to Flickr is Snapfish Photo Sharing www.snapfish.co.nz

Digital and Optical Zoom
With optical zoom 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 then enlarges the cropped portion to fill the frame again. This results in in a significant loss of quality (Sunderland, Tutorial 17 February 2009).

Megapixel
A pixel is a small square of colour in a digital image. A megapixel is one million pixels. It is these millions of tiny pixels that make up the smooth digital image we get to see (Sunderland, Tutorial 17 February 2009).