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Every hobby has its accessories. I sometimes joke that my dive buddy only became interested in scuba diving after she discovered that scuba gear was a whole new way to spend money. While there’s no doubt some truth to that, it’s also true that there are some things you really need to buy to accompany any activity, and digital photography is no exception. Here’s a short shopping list of things you might consider buying as you get more into shooting digitally:

• A camera It goes without saying that you need a camera, but don’t rush into the purchase. You can even use a 35mm camera to begin with, and scan the images into the PC for editing and printing. If you’ve read the previous sections of this chapter and decided what features are important to you, you can shop like a pro.
• An adequate PC Crunching data to process digital images takes a bit more horsepower than you might be used to when working with Word or Excel. I suggest using a Pentium III–class PC with no less than 128MB of RAM. If you want to work with really big images—like 6-megapixel pictures—then consider 256MB of RAM. You might be surprised to learn that more memory is generally more useful than a faster processor.
• Batteries Digital cameras are power hogs. I highly recommend buying two sets of NiMH rechargeable batteries, since they’ll pay for themselves before you can say “alkaline.” If your camera didn’t come with an AC adapter, I suggest that you buy one from the camera vendor’s accessories store so you can power the camera when you’re transferring images to the PC or displaying images on a TV.
• Memory Buy the biggest memory card you can afford. The measly 8MB memory card that came with your camera won’t last a day when you’re on vacation, so having a 128MB or 256MB card is almost essential. A spare card, if it’s in the budget, can keep you going when you fill up your main card far away from your PC.
• Image editing software Your camera probably came with some rudimentary image editor, but it may not be up to the task. Try a few out, and buy the image editor that you like the best. I typically use Paint Shop Pro (from www.jasc.com), for instance.
• Printer Get a good color inkjet printer and premium photo paper. Don’t skimp on this step—when the time comes to print your pictures, why bother having a good camera, this book, and taking the time to improve your photo skills if you’re going to print pictures on a budget printer with lousy paper?
• Tripod If you want to extend your photography into the world of close-ups or long-range telephoto images, a tripod is a necessity. It needn’t be large or heavy, because most digital cameras are significantly lighter than their 35mm counterparts.
• Lenses and filters The time may come when you want to take pictures—like extreme close-ups, wide-angle shots, or extreme telephotos—that are beyond the range of the lens that came with your camera. Likewise, you might want to reduce glare or add other special effects to your images. If that’s the case, you want lenses and filters for your camera. You may not need them right now, but consider them an advanced purchase for later on.
• Camera bag Choose a bag that lets you arrange your camera and accessories in a way that they’re protected from theft and damage, but easy to use when the time comes to shoot a picture. Look for bags that don’t really look like they’re holding camera gear—that might make them less of a target for thieves.

Getting images out of your camera is just as important as taking the pictures to begin with. If you like to view your freshly shot images on a television or want to record them, slide show style, directly to a VCR, then you should definitely consider a camera with a video-out port. Using an ordinary RCA-style composite video cable, you can connect the camera to a TV, VCR, or some other video display unit. ages painlessly, especially compared to the more traditional (and now virtually obsolete) serial cable.
Some cameras include even more convenient solutions, like adapters that accept the removable media card and connect to the computer directly. The advantage with these devices is that you can transfer images without draining the camera batteries, and transfers are often easier to do, since you avoid using arcane transfer software and instead just drag and drop images from a folder on the Windows desktop.

Since digital cameras are part computer, they can be programmed to do some neat tricks that were inconceivable with traditional 35mm cameras. Few of these effects are necessary; in fact, I’d choose a camera based on solid features like the zoom, lens quality, and overall handling before I looked too hard at whether the camera included a video mode or sepia tint. Nonetheless, these are some of the effects you may see:

• Panorama mode This feature takes wide-screen-style images either by automatically cropping the top and bottom off an image or by letting you stitch together several pictures to create one oversized one.
• Movie mode Some cameras can capture short, low-resolution video clips as well as still images. Don’t confuse this with high-quality digital video, though—the results are strictly for Web pages.
• Tint modes With special settings, you can take black-and-white or sepia-tinted stills.

Remember, though, that you can achieve the same effect in an image editor on the PC after the picture is taken, so you aren’t losing anything if your camera lacks this feature. In fact, I’d say it’s better to start with a full-color image; that way you can do whatever you like to it later and always have the high-quality original to fall back on.

Almost all digital cameras come with a built-in flash. The real issue is how well the flash works. Check to see what the maximum range of the flash is and if it works when the camera is in macro, or close focus, mode. You might also want a flash with special features like these:

• Red eye reduction This mode preflashes the subject to try to minimize reflected light from the pupil known as red eye.
• Force/fill Force or fill flash is used to reduce shadows outdoors or in otherwise adequate lighting when the flash might not fire.
• Rear curtain flash This mode fires at the end of a long exposure. It comes in handy at night so that light trails precede the main subject, illuminated by the flash.

Some cameras also come with sync ports or hot shoes that allow you to connect more powerful, external flash units.

The more memory your camera holds, the more pictures you can take. It sounds simple, but don’t forget that cameras come with all different kinds of memory solutions. In general, I’d say it doesn’t matter a lot whether your camera uses Compact Flash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, or Secure Digital memory—the only things to consider are cost and capacity:

• Capacity If you only want to carry a single memory card on a long trip and store a huge number of images, a CompactFlash digital camera is your best choice. You can get CompactFlash cards in capacities as high as 1GB (that’s about a thousand 2-megapixel images). Most of the other memory formats top out around 128MB or 256MB. Of course, you can also buy several memory cards and carry spares.
• Cost The four memory card formats play a lot of leapfrog when it comes to price, so you might want to shop around for memory cards before you commit to a specific camera. But the two newest memory formats—Secure Digital and Memory Stick—typically cost a little more than CompactFlash and SmartMedia.

Of course, few digital cameras come with a fixed focal length lens. The focal length is a measure of how much the camera magnifies the image, and zoom lenses let you zoom in and out of a scene for the perfect composition. In general, the greater the zoom, the better. You’ll commonly see 2X, 3X, and perhaps even 5X zooms on digital cameras. With some simple finger pressure, you can use your camera to go from a normal or wide-angle view to telephoto. The effect of a 4X zoom is apparent in Figure 1-9, taken with the Olympus e-10 at both ends of its zoom range. Beware, though, of a camera’s digital zoom. While optical zooms move the lenses around to actually magnify the image, a digital zoom simply grabs a block of pixels in the middle of the scene and processes them to make the image look enlarged. Since the result is pixely, I suggest you ignore digital zoom ratings when evaluating a camera and just look at the optical zoom ratings.

Also consider what kind of pictures you want to take. A fairly wide-angle lens is good for landscapes, indoor shots, and general-purpose photography. If you want to take portraits or wildlife shots, a longer reach is important. But take a look at the specs for a digital camera—what the heck is a 9.3mm lens? Is that wide angle? Who knows? That’s why most digital cameras also advertise their focal length in “35mm equivalents”—in other words, if this digital camera were a 35mm camera, its 9.3mm lens would give you the same picture as a 50mm camera, for instance.
Making sense of all this can be a pain. Worse, there’s no one formula you can use to convert digital camera focal lengths into 35mm equivalents. That’s because the focal length of a camera lens is based on the size of the film, which in the case of a digital camera is the CCD chip. CCDs vary in size, and there’s no industry-wide consensus on standardizing the size of the CCD in all cameras. So, your best bet is to check out the equivalency figures on the camera box or on the manufacturer’s Web site. I’ve also concocted a formula you can use in a pinch to convert digital camera focal lengths to their 35mm equivalents. Since CCD sizes vary, this is only an approximation. In the following formula, AFL is the actual focal length of the digital camera’s lens, usually a small number like 5mm or 10mm:

35mm equivalent focal length = AFL / .19

So if the camera has a 6.5mm lens, for instance, you can run it through this handy little equation and determine that it will work like a 35mm lens.

First and foremost, figure out how much resolution you need. This should be the first decision you make, because it determines what cameras you will be evaluating. Use this handy table to decide what megapixel range you need:
Remember that even if you choose a 10-megapixel camera, you can set it to capture lower resolution images—even a mere 640 X 480 pixels—making your camera quite versatile. Or you can capture a high-resolution image and reduce its size on the PC in an image-editing program. The higher the resolution, the fewer pictures you can store at a given time, so there is a bit of a trade-off. If you buy a camera with too little resolution, though, you can’t ever add information to a picture, and trying to “blow it up” to print beyond its ideal size will generate a pixely, grainy mess.

Do you need to get a new camera next year just because the megapixel bar has been raised—or some other cool new features have surfaced?
No, you don’t. Just like your desktop computer, a digital camera isn’t obsolete just because a new model came out with more memory or horsepower. It’s only obsolete when it no longer does what you want it to do.
Consider my main digital camera. Although I get to see and play with a large number of cameras every year, I’ve stuck with what you’ll surely consider to be an ancient model—the several-year-old Olympus D-620L. I like this camera because it has a TTL viewfinder and an excellent macro, or close focus, mode. The downside? It’s a mere 1.4 megapixels. That’s so Twentieth Century. That’s okay, though—I use the camera to take screenshots for books, magazines, and Web sites. I rarely need a resolution much beyond 1,024 X 768 for those applications, and that’s well within the capability of this venerable old camera. For my more creative photography, I upgraded to the 5-megapixel Olympus e20n last year, and I suspect it will make me very happy for the next several years.
The bottom line? Find a camera you like and stick with it. Digital cameras are a costly investment, and they won’t “pay for themselves” in film savings if you replace them every year or so with a newer model.

Perhaps the most subjective of digital camera features, the controls are also among the most important. I can’t really tell you which is best; you need to experiment with a few cameras to see which you like the best. Try handling cameras in the store whenever you can. Digital cameras typically feature two distinct control systems: on-body buttons and dials plus on-screen menus. The onscreen menu is commonly used to adjust less frequently used controls, like resolution settings, exposure compensation, and special effects filters. That’s not always the case, though. Epson PhotoPC 3000Z uses buttons to change the resolution without resorting to a menu system. You need to take the time to review your camera manual to find out how to operate all your camera controls. Without knowing how to operate your camera, you can’t really learn to take great pictures.