My Savings Using a Digital Camera on Vacation

Now that we home from our recent month long vacation with a home base of our vacation home in the sunny south, I am taking a bit of time to go through the digital photos I took.  I took a lot of photos!  The total comes to 1,793 but with some deleted as they were uploaded to the computer the true number is likely over 2,000.  I thought it would be interesting to see how much my digital camera saved me.  At 1,793 photos I would have used 56 rolls of 36 exposure film at a cost of about $242.48 at $12.99 per 3 pack of film.  That is a very conservative cost as film tends to be more expensive in tourist areas.  Processing of the 56 rolls of 36 exposure film would cost $839.44 at $14.99 per roll.  This price could be slightly less or slightly more depending on where I got the film processed.  The total cost for film and processing would come in at $1,081.92 on the conservative side!  That mean my main digital camera, a Panasonic DMC-TZ5 bought back in April of 2010 more than paid for itself.  In reality this little beauty along with my Canon PowerShot A540 that I repaired in April of 2010 paid for themselves within the first month of me buying them.  With my savings on film costs I could easy have bought 2 to 3 more digital cameras!  Aside of the cost savings I saved a lot more by using a digital camera.

Film comes wrapped onto a plastic spool, tucked into a plastic film case then packaged in a cardboard container.  Can you imagine how much plastic and cardboard would have been used in 56 rolls of fill all of which would end up in a landfill?  In addition to that silver in used in the film processing creating another environmental problem.  Finally non-rechargeable alkaline batteries work better for cameras that do not have a rechargeable battery pack.  If each pair of batteries gave me 200 pictures then I would have used 18 alkaline batteries that would have ended up in the landfill.  Using the digital camera saved all of this waste from going to a landfill and eliminated the environmental problem of the silver.

Film is subject to light, heat and water damage.  The card in a digital camera is subject to mainly water damage but even that may not be permanent once the card fully dries.  The camera may be sluggish if it is left in freezing temperatures overnight but once warmed it will continue performing as normal.  However, with film there is no way to create a backup system.   The card from a digital camera can be uploaded to your laptop each day and if you don't have a laptop or computer with you, the files can be burned to CD or flash drive at the end of each day at many department and drug stores thus creating an automatic backup of your pictures.  Cards are quite inexpensive now so for well under $100 it is possible to have two or three cards with considerable storage space so you don't have to erase after uploading to the laptop just in case.  When the card is full upload to your laptop but don't erase the card.  Pop in a fresh card and you are ready to go with two copies of the previous card.  In fact you can upload digital photos to a couple of sources just in case.  This is virtually impossible to do with film.

Unlike a flash drive or digital camera card, film takes up a lot of room.  Fifty-six rolls of fill likely would have filled at least two large zipper-loc bags.  Now that doesn't seem like a lot but when you are traveling with limited space whether by car or plane that is a lot.  My one card at 2 GB holds 500 pictures at my settings.  Along with it's little case it takes up about a quarter of space in my purse as a packet of Tic-Tacs.  All around a digital camera is the way to go for day to day as well as vacation photography!

Garden Gnome
©2006-2011

Photo Enhancement

There are many reasons for enhancing your photos. I have been learning how to better use the features in Adobe Photoshop CS Version 8.0. This is a lovely program with a lot of function that I was basically using to simply resize images. Instead of taking the time to learn more about what this program could do, I simply bought a couple of scrapbooking programs when I decided to start into digital scrapbooking. This was not the frugal way to do things when I already had a program that could do all these things and so much more. For my genealogy images, I simply uploaded them to the program without any type of enhancement. Well, suffice to say I am now learning the different features thanks to a couple of very nice Yahoo groups and a lot of tutorials.

On Tap

I've been playing with animation, filters, and layers. So today I tried out a couple of ways to make picture frames. This is the result of my first attempt.

This is a photo taken at a restaurant we enjoy. I always have my camera with me when away from home and within easy reach at home. I take a lot of pictures! Digital just makes it so easy. My current digital camera is a Canon PowerShot A450, 6.0 mega pixel and 4x optical zoom. Holding the zoom control it will go up to 16x but the graininess increases. This only seems to be noticeable on certain photographs though. Back to the photo, I liked the looks of the copper beer tap so snapped a photo of it.

I did something wrong on this tutorial but am not sure what. The only thing I can figure is I merged to many layers. That's easy to do since I'm rather new at using layers. My end result was an 8" x 10" supposed to be frame with no way to remove the background leaving only the frame so I decided to improvise. I opened the photo, did a cut and past, then centred it onto the frame image, added my name then merged the layers. I thought the results weren't too bad and that the colour of the resulting frame accents the photo is rather a fluke too. The frame consists of layers with filters creating texture and beveling.

Ice on Water

Well onto the second tutorial. I used a picture taken by me a couple of days ago. We live on the water so I take a lot of water shots. This one was so much easier to follow. I added my name to the photo and merged the layers. Then I duplicated that layer and added a gaussian blur filter, layer set to multiply and adjusted the opacity. After merging the layers, I created a new layer, dragged that to the bottom and created the first matt by changing the canvas size by .2. The next layer was created the same way with canvas size at .5 and the third at .8. Each matt was filled using a colour picked from the picture using the eye dropper tool then filled with the paintbucket tool. Overall I like the effect. I think it gives a more formal look that will work nicely for enhancing my genealogy photos.

Ice on Water with Filters

This is the same picture as above but slightly cropped with no frame and more filters added. I thought it would be neat to try and get that true sparkly look of the ice. The sun was very bright when this picture was taken so I started playing to try and capture that feeling.

I added the name, merged the layers then did the gaussian adjustment. Now, the gaussian adjustment was another tutorial that works with layers. Depending on how it is used, it deepens the colours and just softly softens the edges a bit. It seems to work better on some photos than others. Once the gaussian adjustment I used a texture filter set to patchwork. That looked rather interesting but it still did not have the sparkle I wanted. An artistic filter set to plastic wrap seemed to fit best and this was the end result. I can't wait to use this in scrapbooking!

Golden Glow

This was something I was just playing around with after working with frames. The picture was taken during sunset the same day the water picture above was taken. The sky was absolutely gorgeous!

I discovered that the marquee gave other shapes than rectangular so decided to test it out. After several attempts and realizing that once it's make if you use the move tool, it moves leaving a transparent background. So I hit copy then new and then paste. Well that looked pretty good but I thought some type of frame would be nice except I didn't know how to do that so I beveled that layer instead. Then I added my name and merged. I liked the effects and think this will be perfect for both scrapbooking and genealogy.

Hopefully this gives you a few ideas of what is possible as far as photo enhancement. I am definitely in the learning stages. It is amazing some of the effects you can get. I encourage you to try some of these techniques. There are a lot of resources to help you learn them. The possibilities are endless and I can't wait to use them in my scrapbooking and genealogy projects!

Enjoy!

Garden Gnome
© 2007