In a message dated 8/1/01 1:41:50 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< If you can find a camera with a good zoom lens, choose it over the optical
 zoom which almost any photo editing program can do on your computer.  The
 more your viewfinder is filled with the subject you're interested in
 recording, the better your edited and finished photos will be.>>

   I think Richard means to use optical zoom in preference to digital zoom.
Digital zoom is simply cropping, which, as he says, can be better done with
editing software. Optical zoom is using the lens as a telephoto.   And his
advice to get close is right on.   Most amateur photographers tend to shoot
from too far away. As much as possible, do the cropping with the camera, as
you shoot.  It's pretty disappointing to have a shot that looks good, but
after you crop it properly is now too coarse to be a really good shot.
Especially when all you had to do to make it a great shot was to move closer.

 <<If you intend to keep the photos in an archive for a long time, have them
 reduced to film from your digital format and printed.  The inks in most
 digital printers fade far faster than photographic prints.  If you intend
 to store them on disk for future use, keep in mind that electronic
 storage, optical storage, and magnetic storage all degrade over time.>>

    Optical format is the longest lasting; most likely it will outlast us;
whether we will still have the devices to read it is the question, as
technology moves on.  But burning CD disks is the most permanent storage we
have available for home use today. Fortunately its the cheapest storage as
well.  So get your good shots on a CD ASAP.

    I don't think film has any advantage over a CD, unless it is strictly
black and white. I have 70 year old B & W negatives that are still in
excellent shape. This is based strictly on silver, which will last until the
base itself gets too brittle to stand up. But color photos less than half
that age are pretty far gone. They are based on dyes, which will fade.  The
marvelous thing is that there are now computer programs that can fairly well
resurrect the colors, given the information on the negative.

    It is important to either save your master copy, unedited, or a TIF
version of the same.  JPG (which is becoming the most common format for
digital cameras) and other photo formats compress the image to save file
space. However this causes some loss of information as well. If you open a
JPG file and work on it a little with an image editor, then save it, you will
lose some info. If you do this more than once, the image will begin to look
blocky, because each time you save it, you will lose more information.
You'll see this first in areas with similar tone, such as the sky.  Once the
info is lost, it cannot be regained. So always save the original master or a
TIF copy, and do your editing from it each time, but don't save it in such a
way as to overwrite the master.  That's one of the advantages of writing a
copy of the original to a CD-R disc, which cannot be overwritten by mistake.

Dave Green
Gallery of Flowers and Visitors:  http://pollinator.com/gallery/gallery.htm