Nature and landscape photographers have always aspired for highly focused and visibly “sharp” images.  Digital photography has many of the same challenges and solutions as film for creating the sharpest images, plus a few additional ones as well.  With any camera there are some tried and true ways to capture sharp images.  Of course the quality of your camera’s lens and proper focusing techniques are major factors.  Using a tripod to eliminate camera motion or vibration and shooting with the smallest possible aperture (shutter opening) to gain the greatest focal depth are two other time honored techniques for getting sharp images.  For slow shutter speeds using a cable release or timer to activate the camera allows you to avoid touching it and causing vibrations.  Higher end SLR cameras often have a mirror lock setting so that the viewfinder mirror can be locked before the shutter opens.  The movement of the mirror in SLRs can cause enough vibration in the camera to affect sharpness at shutter speeds between about 1/10 of a second and 2 seconds.

All of these techniques work well with both film and digital capture.  Digital cameras introduce some new considerations for creating sharp images, however.  The human eye recognizes sharpness as crisp lines along edges.  When digital cameras evaluate the information captured by their sensors and try to assemble it into a realistic picture there is a slight amount of blending of colors along edges making the image appear less sharp.  When shooting in jpeg capture mode, most digital cameras will automatically apply some “digital” sharpening along edges to counter this affect.  Many cameras allow the user to preset how much sharpening the camera will apply.  If simple in-camera sharpening is what you are looking for, consult your user’s manual to find out how to adjust the amount of sharpening that is applied.  When shooting in RAW capture mode, no sharpening is added to the image at all.  Whether shooting in RAW or jpeg mode, I prefer to apply my sharpening later with photo editing software like Photoshop because it offers more control and better quality.  There are many different digital tools for enhancing the sharpness of your photos.  In Photoshop my favorite is “unsharp mask” found in the filters menu.  It can be a little tricky to figure out, but I find that a higher amount (80-200) and smaller radius (.5 –1.5) with the threshold set to 0 or 1 works well for a final sharpening pass right before printing.  You need to experiment a bit to get it right.  To really see the effect of the sharpening, view the image at 100%.  Be careful not to over sharpen giving your image unnatural halos and a plasticized look.  When used to prepare an image for printing, email or web use, it is best to apply the unsharp mask filter at the end of the editing process.  Resizing and making other adjustments after sharpening can decrease sharpness and even cause loss of quality.  For this reason it is also important not to save an image with final sharpening applied.  Instead, apply sharpening to fit the desired output size, purpose and use each time you print or email an image.  Then close the image without saving it in its sharpened state, or save it with a new name if you plan to use it in that exact format again.

Whether you are a full time pro or the family photo historian, digital technology has changed the way we shoot and store photos. Digital cameras and electronic storage have us all clicking away, taking massive amounts of images and feeling largely free from the concerns of the costs of film and developing as well as needing to find space for boxes of prints or slides and having to throw out all of the duds. Once you own the equipment, shooting 1,000 shots isn’t any more expensive or wasteful than shooting one. Editing still takes time, but if you learn how to effectively use image management software, this time can be greatly reduced. Storage of large numbers of images is less of an issue with digital as well. No more need for volumes of photo albums or closets full of slides. Depending on the size of the digital image files and the size of the hard drive, thousands or even millions of images can be stored right in your computer.

With your entire collection of digital images stored on your hard drive, protecting against file corruption or hard drive failure is the new big issue that photographers have to consider. Over the past six or seven years of consumer digital camera development, storage and back up of digital image files has been a hot topic of discussion. For a while the trend was to utilize removable media, such as CD or DVD, to store and back up digital photos, but this is no longer seen as the best solution. CDs vary in quality. Some more expensive brands can last for decades, but cheaper ones can begin to break down in a matter of years. CDs also have limited storage capacity. A six-megapixel camera (a common size now available) can produce RAW files that are 18 megabytes when converted to TIFF. Only 38 of these images will fit on a CD. If you have thousands of images, the number of CDs needed to back up your collection becomes prohibitive. With rapid changes in technology the CD may go the way of the eight-track tape and the floppy disk in a few years, leaving you without a way to access your stored images. DVDs offer a bit more storage space, but even so a DVD can still only hold about 220 18-megabyte files. Additionally, DVDs are even less stable than CDs and have a maximum life of only several years, so they are not a good option for long-term storage.

So what is the best back up solution? Right now the experts are supporting the use of high capacity external hard drives. External hard drives are available in sizes ranging from 50 gigabytes up to several hundred gigabytes and are relatively inexpensive (about $1 to $2 per gigabyte). They are easily connected to your computer via high-speed USB 2.0 or FireWire connections and you can add as many as your computer has ports for. Files on an external hard drive are much more accessible than a collection of CDs or DVDs and they can still be edited, resaved and deleted as with any other hard drive. Hard drives store data magnetically, and this information can fade or become corrupted over time, but it is a fairly simple matter to recopy all the contents of a hard drive from time to time to “refresh” the stored data. As new storage technology emerges, transferring your image files from your old hard drive will be an easy matter. I use two 250-gigabyte external drives to house my photo collection. One is the primary drive that I work from and the second is a backed up mirror image of the first drive. Every few days I copy the contents of drive one to drive two. Then I can completely unplug drive two from my computer to protect it from crashes and surges and can even store it in a different physical location to protect it from fire or theft. Well-known manufacturers of external hard drives include Maxtor, LaCie and SimpleTech and can be purchased at retailers like Office Depot or Staples or your local computer dealer. Your digital photos represent the same kind of irreplaceable property that film once did. It is a good idea to make sure that your collection is properly stored and backed up.

Producing a perfect exposure has been the Holy Grail for photographers since the dawn of photography. In times past, taking a properly exposed photo required lottery-winning luck or a degree in mathematics. Ansel Adams developed his zone system to enhance his chances of properly exposing his photos. More recently, hand held light meters and in-camera metering systems made it easier to determine the right camera settings for a given scene. Even still, there was always an element of guesswork and no way of knowing the exposure was correct until the film was developed. Photographers would often burn through tons of film bracketing their shots in hopes that at least one would be exposed correctly. With digital photography there is finally a much improved exposure tool; the histogram.

Today’s digital SLR cameras and even many mid to high-level fixed lens digital cameras have a histogram tool built into their functions. A histogram is nothing more than a basic bar graph. The histogram in digital cameras graphs the light captured when taking a photo. At first a histogram can be a bit cryptic, but with a little practice it is an easy and foolproof way of knowing if you have created a good exposure right after taking the shot.

The basics to understanding a digital camera histogram really are, well, basic. The colors a digital camera can “see” are assigned numbers from 0 to 255. Zero is black and 255 is pure white. On a histogram, the left side of the graph is 0 or black and the right side is 255 or white. The way to know that you have a good exposure is if all the information on the histogram falls within this range.

If any of the information is bunched at the left side of the graph and appears cut off on the left side the shadows have been underexposed and detail in the shadows has been lost.

If a lot of the information is bunched up and cut off on the very right side of the graph this indicates that the highlights have been overexposed and there will be a loss of detail in the brightest parts of the image.

Once either side of the histogram have been “clipped” that data is missing from the image and can not be resotred. The good news is that it is easy to check the histogram when you take a shot allowing you to make the needed adjustments and take the photo again.

Even if all the image information is contained within the boundaries of the histogram, it is preferable to try to keep the bulk of the graph centered or even a bit to the right, as long as the graph doesn’t get clipped off indicating a loss of detail. The reason for this is that darker areas in a digital image are more susceptible to digital noise, especially when adjustments are made. Less noise is introduced adjusting a light image than adjusting a dark image.

Some people make the mistake of thinking that all their histograms need to be perfect bell curves. This isn’t the case since every scene has different proportions of dark, light and all the color in the spectrum. A shot of dark green trees will have more data on the left side of the graph than a shot of snow. The goal isn’t to have the histogram be a perfect curve as long as all the data remains within the histogram range.

So, how do you find your histogram? Consult your instruction manual. If your camera has a histogram it will appear on the LCD viewing screen when accessed. On some cameras it is found within the system of menus. On my cameras I access the histogram by pressing the “Info.” button on the back of my camera while I am viewing an image.