Equipment and the obligatory introduction Around November of 2000, I jumped onto the digital photography bandwagon when I purchased an Olympus point-and-shoot digital camera. It wasn't the best, nor the smallest (which at the time was the Canon S100/Digital Elph), but it fit nicely in my budget and took decent pictures. Eventually, I have upgraded to a Canon EOS Elan 7E film camera and a Canon EOS Digital Rebel camera.

Why a digital point-and-shoot? My whole aim of buying a digital camera was to learn composition in photography. Since bits are cheap and prints/slides, relatively expensive, a digital camera would help you to improve composition, as initially, you have to shoot a lot of pictures. Once you get a feel for better composition, you can go and learn the technical details of using a "proper" camera. Today, given the omnipresence of digital SLRs, it probably makes sense to buy into a good digital SLR system if you are serious about photography.

Take a look at the Photography Articles section to help you make up your mind, as to which way to go. That section also contains some useful tips of photography technique.

For a look at some of my digital images, please check out my portfolio. Detailed travel information and travelogues for most of the places I have visited and photographed, can be found in the Travel Section of this site.

To manipulate? The digital platform allows you to desaturate/decompose colored images into black and white art, sepia tone them to give an old look or add borders around images to make them stand out. Any image editing software such as GIMP (on BSD/Linux), WinGIMP (on Windows) or Photoshop (Windows), can do the job. Digital manipulation is a sensitive topic, but there are a few basic "darkroom" steps that you should take to make your end result approach what you actually saw when you took the image.

Or not to manipulate? There is a fine line between touching up your photographs to remove flaws and completely changing the image that your camera captured. My rule of thumb is that you should never lie to yourself and to your viewers. Using any image editing software, you can doctor a digital image to be whatever your imagination can conjure up, something which might not be there in reality. This should not be the purpose of switching to digital, otherwise thou shalt never learn. Use the digital platform to edit minor flaws in the image - like color balance, brightness and contrast, and levels. If you do perform significant digital manipulation, please let your viewers know about it.

Organize, organize, organize Since I have gone digital, I have been taking innumerable pictures and have been wasting petabits on gazillion CDRs. Slowly, I started feeling the need to organize and store my pictures in a methodical manner. You can find a well-oiled procedure for organizing your stock photography at the Digital Photography for BSD/Linux users page. The set of ideas, software and/or scripts provided should automate the entire process of organizing and archiving, and should enable you to focus more on photography, than archiving.

Using GIMP, WinGIMP (both free) or PhotoShop (very expensive)
for the Digital Darkroom

Note: This section applies to GIMP version 1.x. The tools are similar on version 2.x, but they don't fall under the same submenus.

• Copy: First, remember to keep a copy of your originals. I use my Publish directory to perform all enhancements, if any. My originals are always burnt read-only on CDR. Remember, you can always use GIMP to get your publishable image from the original, but its very difficult to go the reverse way.

• Adjust levels: Load the images in GIMP, and open the RightClick->Image->Colors->Levels menu. Use the white-end and black-end Input-Level sliders and move them *slightly* towards the middle. Take the middle slider and move it right or left (again very slightly) for an overall darker or lighter picture respectively. With the middle slider towards the right, you get a slightly more saturated look.
• Throw Oomph into your images: Open the RightClick->Image->Colors->Curves dialog, and press on the top and bottom third of the diagonal line to see. Ever so slightly, drag the top third more towards the top, and the lower third, more towards the bottom. You can play around with these thirds till you are satisfied with the result.
• Sharpen Image: Open RightClick->Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask and choose a Radius of 1.6, Amount .40, and Threshold 0.0. This gives you a decent amount of sharpness. I don't sharpen my thumbnails.
• Black & White:The easiest way is to desaturate [RightClick->Image->Colors->Hue and Saturation, turn Saturation to -100], or transform the image to Grayscale [RightClick->Image->Mode->Grayscale]. I feel that a better method is to decompose the image into its RGB components [RightClick->Image->Mode->Decompose, then choose RGB], and pick the one that matches your expectations the closest.
• Sepia Toning:First, convert the image to black and white (see above). Then, convert the image to RGB [RightClick->Image->Mode->RGB]. This doesn't colorize your image, but instead allows you to add colors to it. Next, bring up the Color Balance window [RightClick->Image->Colors]. Choose values of Yellow and Red under Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights, that satisfy you. Try not to go beyond a value of 10/-10 for any color. Once you are satisfied, remember or save these settings in a script. This way you are guaranteed a uniform tone every time.